This was my first Sunday in a while where I could tackle the caravan of minutae that passes through ones life and I fealt a primal link to every man who’s ever spent an afternoon ‘cleaning up’.  I don’t like the term “cleaning” for the rearrangement of items we call stuff and entropy incarnate we call dust and dirt and much prefer to call it “sorting”.  My arrangement system is as ideopathic as the next man’s as despite using my scarves but once or twice a year and my 7 7/8ths Lock and Co hat never they both have a more prominent place than the gloves and ushanka that are my talismans of winter.  Such is the way of things.

I enjoy the act of boxing, whereby disparate items undo their diaspora and are containerized into the embodiment of forgetting of the attic.  This was different as I was moving Scout stuff that is pulled out with an insistent seasonality that rivals the migration of geese.  Looking over the list makes me look like some mad pack rat or alternatively MacGuyver’s supply division:

1) 130 glass eye droppers
2) 600 flexible straws
3) 1.5 miles of sissal binder twine
4) 300 wooden yellow pencils
5) 12 pairs of scissors

All these items went into “Fall Scout Program Box #6” and were placed in my attic which is slowly turning into a program armory that is strangly exempt from my normal organizational rules.  Every January 1st I reseason my cast iron cook wear and reverse everything in my cloths closet.  If by the next Jan 1 the wearable hasn’t been used, the hanger will still be backwards and will be moved to a box in the bottom of my closet.  After another cycle, the box moves to the attic where I will theoretically donate it to charity after another year but I’ve yet to do this.  I’ve been slowly losing weight over the past 8 months and it tickled me to rewear something I’d expanded out of but my tastes have changed and the golf shirt is now the acme of a different Terry.

I found a boat model piece my brother made when he was 14 or so, clocking in at 15 years ago.  Is there a statute of limitations on how long I have to wait after someone moves out before I can trash their stuff?  I hope I never find out and can depend on something like the roof collapsing to serve as my mnemonic brushfire, clearing out the weeds to make room for more things.  That, or I could build shelves.