This is an essay that I wrote last week related to a bit of spring-cleaning I’m still in the process of carrying out. Out of necessity more than anything else.

Word Count: 1138

The Great

Hoarding Purge

Getting rid of stuff from one’s past can be a healthy endeavor, in addition to giving a person this weird sense of satisfaction. The Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines the word “Purge” as the act of cleansing or purifying of something from a person’s life. Another definition puts it more bluntly stating in no uncertain terms; to purge is, “getting rid of things”. I like to think that’s exactly what I did over the past few months. Basically in an attempt to achieve this strange inner sense of contentment, and as a recent former U.S. president so succinctly put it, “Mission accomplished.”

This “purge” of items from my past came about when a buddy of mine made the fateful decision to move to Mancos this past October. I’d been storing almost everything I own in the basement of the building where he had his workshop, and the great cleansing of my past didn’t even start till January. Nothing like putting these things off till you’re forced to act.

At first I actually just transported boxes of stuff from the basement to another spot. Specifically the restaurant where I work in the summer which since its closed in the winter, became a surrogate storage facility for not only my stuff, but a huge number of things owned by the boss and her family.

I enjoy working for her since she’s a good person, but let’s face facts. The lady’s pack rat tendencies make my former hoarding habits look like a mild bout of the 24-hr. flu, as opposed to a full-blown case of pneumonia-which she definitely suffers from.

Like I said, the clearing out of the basement was at first just the moving of boxes from one spot to another. Then a nasty winter storm hit us, and I used that as a somewhat legitimate excuse to avoid dealing with the basement clean out. The result was me hanging out on a Sunday afternoon without much to do.

Because it’s such an easy thing to do, I turned the TV on and started channel surfing. Now I pride myself in never having watched an entire episode of a reality based television show. Sure enough that afternoon, I came across one and it just so happens that it was a digression of the A & E reality program, “Hoarders”. Another great American cultural contribution.

This episode chronicled a woman named “Tara” who is forced to confront her hoarding habits when the threat of being evicted forces her to clean out the accumulated stuff she’s collected over time. This includes already used McDonald’s Happy Meal boxes and other assorted treasures. After watching the program for about five minutes (five minutes of my life basically wasted) I turned the TV off and read a magazine article instead.

That night while lying in bed I couldn’t fall asleep. Specifically because I kept coming back to what I’d watched earlier in the day, and telling myself I never wanted to become such an extreme collector of “stuff”. Something must’ve kicked in big time while I was sleeping that night since I got to the basement pile of boxes the next day and sure enough, started making a huge pile of old scrapbook material to discard. Over time the pile grew bigger, and pretty soon I found myself making multiple trips to the town dump so I could make a massive contribution to the paper and cardboard recycling dumpsters (got to be environmentally conscious don’t you know).

Eventually I ended up discarding almost every scrapbook I so carefully assembled all those years ago, and getting rid of material that I was planning on putting into future life chronology books. I have to admit that I got a little too extreme with the assembly of the record books at earlier periods in my life. Ran across numerous pages where I saved questionable restaurant receipts, goofy doodles, and meaningless newspaper clippings. What was my justification for putting this stuff in a scrapbook in the first pace? More importantly, “why” did this fodder go in a record book to begin with if I couldn’t even figure out what it was saved for in the first place?

Then the great purge started happening for other things in the massive pile of junk. Those boxes of National Geographic magazines? Getting rid of them stung a little bit, but I got over it eventually. My strategy of closing my eyes as I was throwing the Nat. Geos. in the dumpster worked quite effectively, thank you.

The Second Chance Thrift Store in Durango? Over a two-week period they received a massive donation of old clothes, lamps and blankets that’ll never get used, and assorted other odds & ends. By my fourth trip, the guy taking the collections started recognizing me when I’d drive up.

At one time while living in Telluride I made regular trips to the community “Free Box” so I could accumulate old skis with the intent of one day building a fence with the boards. This will definitely never happen, and as part of “The Great Purge of spring ‘17” I gave all of the skis I’d collected to the owner of the Avalanche Café. What they’ll do with them I have no idea. The guy said something about making benches out of the skis, but I didn’t listen. I’m just glad to have eliminated the toys from my new minimalist universe.

When I told him about my purging exploits, another good friend of mine commented that eliminating things from your past is sort of like taking a massive constitutional, (or “laying some anti-fragrant cable” as certain people refer to it). Sounds kind of gross, but when you think about it this makes a lot of sense. My “cleansing” behavior does indeed feel kind of liberating when you get right down to it.

This brings us to an interesting conundrum. Just how far do I take this elimination practice? Do I throw out everything from my past in an attempt to make life easier? Some of the stuff, but not all; in a word, “no.”

I’m holding on to all the wall hangings and lots of mementos from the Kenya–Peace Corps years. I set two of the “Trip to End All Trips-Tibet-China” experience Scrapbooks aside with the thought that I may come back to looking through them one day. I’m keeping certain things, but not much. Just enough to excite me thirty years from now when I’m Barca-lounger bound and bored out of my skull.

One final point; where do I go from here? Hold onto one or two things, but discard everything else? Of course not. More than likely I’ll probably just start building up the pile of stuff again now that I’ve reduced it to a new, somewhat manageable collection of belongings?