Scorched Earth

One of my favorite things to do when we move is throw things away. Half empty jars of sauerkraut, holey underwear, unread magazines, molten candle stumps-- all of it, out, out, out! It's a dizzying high for me, a cleansing euphoria. I like to think of the period before the move as a time in which I have to streamline my orbit of stuff, to become as light and aerodynamic as possible so that when I launch into this new situation, there are no fusty old pieces of crap weighing me down.

Pants has a different philosophy, and my recent Kristallnacht on the junk recesses in our house threw him into a panic. It's the beginning of the end!, some dark corner of his mind shouted, and since then he's taken to asking me questions like this when we're lying in bed on the verge of sleep:

"You know that plastic piece that fell off my Storm Trooper model last year?"

"What? No."

"It's gray. That little gray plastic piece. I had it in a pile of buttons and stuff in the spare bedroom. Do you know what happened to it?"

"No." (Half truth-- the whole truth would go, "No, but I'll bet if I came across some random little piece of gray plastic I would have tossed it without a second thought, especially if it was in a pile of buttons.")

The lights go on, and as I lie there groaning and flailing for a pillow to cover my face, he disappears to paw through boxes in the spare bedroom until half an hour later, equally triumphant and guilty, he emerges-- "Found it!"

Great.

Pants and I are at opposite ends of the junk spectrum. He was raised by parents who were themselves raised by survivors of the Great Depression in the Dust Bowl. Echoes of hardship and frugality are pronounced, even the subjects of family jokes and lore, in his parents' (quite comfortable) home. If at any point, the U.S. were the target of nuclear attack, the Pants family homestead would supply and protect its entire neighborhood, and could even set up and rule a bartering system based on canned goods and childhood relics.

Pants's definition of junk, in fact, is quite narrow and applies mostly to anything used exclusively for decorative purposes. Anything else can be saved, repaired, scavenged for parts, or sold on EBay for a ridiculous profit.

Far in the distance, at the vanishing point of the spectrum, is where my definition lives. Junk to me is anything old and easily replaceable, anything unused a year after its purchase date, anything I'm sick of looking at, anything someone else would make better use of.

At a very early age, I learned that anything too old, too small, or too unappreciated was far better off in a giant black plastic bag bound for Goodwill. My mom (Hi, Mom! Honestly, I'm not saying you scarred me!) supervised regular purges of my bedroom-- clothes, books, toys, stuffed animals (whom I fully believed to be sentient and vying constantly for my love, weeping their button eyes out when I chose to sleep with a different one), were all held up mercilessly and robotically to the question, "Keep or give away? Keep or give away? Keeporgiveaway?" Too many "keep"s was bad news. The ratio of "give away"s had to reach some kind of agonizing golden mean to buy time between each raid. Then at the end of the raid, she would always say, "Now, look at this place! Don't you feel better?"

At first, it seemed like she was mocking my pain-- Miss Mousy was suffocating at the bottom of her Hefty bag grave, right underneath my half used sticker collection-- but after the first couple of raids, I did start to feel better in my newly streamlined room.

When my family moved to another town, and then overseas where our whole household had a weight limit, it became kind of comforting to be able to quantify exactly how much stuff tied you to the earth in any one place. The problem, of course, was that eventually that number got dangerously low and was spread thinly over two continents, neither of which felt like it was "home." It's dangerous not to feel just a little tied down.

Now though, after being married to him through several seasons and moves, my definition of "home" is beginning to switch to simply Pants himself. My mom said this would happen, and it's kind of a relief, since getting married and moving out of state with him right away was so thoroughly not-home that it gave me "heartache." But now it's OK. If we could make it work in the tiny, tiny town in South of Everywhere, Texas, surely we can handle California.

That is, if we can get out there with all the JUNK he won't let me throw out. My secret wish list for stuff I'd like to throw out:

*All the empty beer and wine bottles he's been saving since two moves ago, waiting for us to move to climate that's not so scorching hot so he can make wine with the wine-making kit he got in Florida.

*The extra version of the board game Taboo we're inexplicably saving

*All the commemorative beer steins from cool pubs he visited before we were dating

*The yellowish fax machine his folks gave us ("But it works!" Yes, but we'll never be not-cheap enough to buy a land line.)

*The rickety, yellowing, clamp-on desk light with the scruffy rabbit's foot chained to it that he's had since he was a kid (see above, irrelevant defense that it still functions).

*And finally, at the risk of biting the keyboard that feeds me sweet, sweet Internet lifeblood, THIS JANKETY LAPTOP!!