While watching television in the basement…
Bump, thump, bump, CRASH!
An avalanche of household goods cascades down the basement stairs.
“What the…?”
“Put your junk away!” my wife yells as a 50′ extension cord whistles through the air and flops on the carpet.
Throwing stuff down the stairs is her way of moving things to the basement. She has bad knees, so it is understandable that she avoids the stairs – but being married to me, it is also understandable that she employs a dramatic flair whenever she can.
I examine the clutter at the bottom of the steps. In addition to the extension cord, I find an old-style phone charger, a sponge mop and several magazines, all featuring Jennifer Aniston on the cover.
“Hey,” I yell back up the stairs, “Nothing here is mine.” I place emphasis on the word mine to distinguish ownership from ours.
“Well, it doesn’t belong up here.”
“Then throw it away,” I yell.
“I want to keep it,” she says.
“Then find a home for it.”
“I just did,” she snaps.
“So what am I supposed to do with it?”
“Throw it on THE PILE.”
THE PILE is an interesting feature in the southeast corner of our basement. It contains all the things my wife wants to keep but does not want to see and all the things that I neither want to keep nor see.
So they temporarily reside in a pile.
You see, the basement is my domain and therefore everything in the THE PILE is destined to inevitably and slyly work its way back up the stairs.
This re-circulation process – whereby items fly down the stairs then surreptitiously crawl back up is known as The Clutter Cycle.
It begins when an object finds its way into the stream of daily life.
For several days, this newly acquired thing will merrily ply the eddies of everyday use, bobbing and twirling about until we lose interest in it and it becomes clutter.
The sports section of a newspaper that has been cast upon the floor will inevitably attract another section of the newspaper. This will in turn become the base for next week’s edition. Soon a novel joins it – then perhaps a pair of tennis shoes or a plate, even a pot roast might settle in – and before you know it, we have a full blown reef in our living room.
Reefs are excellent places for me to stash old magazines that babble on endlessly about Jennifer Aniston. So it is there that I reintroduce them into The Clutter Cycle.
If the item is small, I return it to The Junk Drawer.
This drawer holds everything that cannot be excluded by size.
It has become the tar pit of our household, a site where future archaeologists will one day dig up our ancient secrets.
“Oh look! I found a cabinet knob!” one archaeologist will cry as she hands it to her colleague, “Could this be a remnant of cabinets gone by?”
“Naw,” her colleague will say, “it is an artifact of a promise gone by. The one where a husband promised to replace the knobs in the vanity but forgot where he tossed it.”
If the object is large, it goes in The Stair That Lead Nowhere.
The stairs lay hidden behind a door in our hall. This useless staircase ascends straight up into the ceiling. It is if the contractors who framed our house did not share the same blueprints. The crew who framed the first floor thought the house had two stories and the crew who framed the roof failed to mention the error, leaving the staircase as their little joke.
But the stairs have found a purpose. We use them as shelves to hold everything we want to keep handy but out of sight. We keep the big stuff at the bottom and toss the little thing to the top. Unfortunately, the little things get jealous of all the attention the things at the bottom get, so they slide down to create a big mess at the base of the stairs.
But no worries, whenever we want something, we simply open the door and everything tumbles out. By methodically tossing it back in, we stand a good chance of finding what we are looking for.
So once I have stashed the magazines back in the living room, the phone charger in the junk drawer and the extension cord to the top of The Stairs That Lead Nowhere, I return to the contentment of my basement.
That is when my wife’s phone rings.
Through the floor, I hear the faint murmuring and mutterings of a conversation that ends with an audible GASP!
Then….
Bump, thump, bump, CRASH!
“What the…?”
But I get no response. All I hear is footsteps scurrying frantically overhead.
After threading my way back up the stairs, I ask, “What is going on?”
She shoves a large section of the living room reef into my arms. “I promised to host a baby shower on Friday. Do something with this!”
“But.. but..” I stutter.
“Quite arguing and get busy – and for Pete Sake, do something about YOUR Pile in the Basement.”
Almost Iowa 
Clutter is the way I stay in shape. Well, it’s what keeps me moving about. I have to shift our stuff from place to place. I’ve been doing it for years. We are empty nesters finally and people ask if we are bored or lonely. Shoot no. I’m moving my stuff around and have twenty five years of stuff I haven’t had time to sort through just waiting to be looked at. I get it. Clutter. hmmm You can tell your wife it’s important to have gatherings and company to move the clutter out of sight on a regular basis. It makes you feel like a neat nick for a few days.
Jeez, this made my skin crawl. My ex was… I hate to say hoarder. Let’s just say squirreler. His designated crypt was the HUGE room over our 2+ car garage. This was his shop, his model railroad set up, his collection of every Apple computer ever made. Oh, sorry. I have to go take a pill.
Oh how I wish not, but I have so been there! Great piece. Thanks for sharing.
When we get invited to other people’ homes, they usually have spent a good amount of time tidying up for company. I often fantasize that their homes are always that neat and uncluttered. It’s good to know from your post and most of the comments that it ain’t necessarily so. Whew, I feel so much better about our mess.
Show me a house that is neat and clean enough for company and I will show you a house that no one wants to be forced to live in.
You might get a kick out of this story. It is what happens when the mother-in-law comes to visit. See Deep Cleaning
Ha! I loved your categories and had all three before I FINALLY decluttered and started living lightly. But even now, If I stay in a place more than a month, acquisitions attach themselves to me and I have to be firm and cast them off. Thanks for liking my pist
So what you’re really saying is you’ll need to add a second story to hold your stuff, an elevator to reach it, hire a curator to organize it, and a tour guide to show you around.
I keep telling myself that I will dedicate one hour a day to declutter/get rid of stuff but I rarely find the time. Your story makes me glad we don’t have a basement or stairs.
You are lucky you don’t have ten acres and a shed too. 🙂
Love the detail on the cabinet knob as an artifact of a promise gone by. 😉
Nice spin on that!
Yeah, and I am going to have to deliver on that promise – just as soon as I finish cleaning the Stairs That Lead Nowhere.
Very funny and I’m so glad to know that there are more people like my husband and I. I’ve been de-cluttering for a number of years and yet there’s more clutter piling up. I suppose most of the de-cluttering I do is for tomorrow.
One is always decluttering a cluttered house – just not fast enough.
Sigh! :’)
I’m not married, I don’t have any basement or stairs, and I’ve been decluttering for so many years there’s really not much left to toss around, but you’ve given me my Proustian moment for the day with those two little words: junk drawer.
I can see it in every detail, in the house I grew up in: a large, squarish drawer between the refrigerator and the built-in oven. The cabinetry had copper pulls, and when you pulled that drawer out — well. I can see: rubber bands, a tiny metal tape measure, extra batteries, a screwdriver, extra lids for canning jars, a blue plastic coaster, a few plastic body parts from an old Cootie game. There’s more, but I think I’ll just sit here and look at it for a while. I sure would like to be back there with my folks, just for a while. I’d even clean out the drawer for them.
There is a wonderful moment from the AMC series Mad Men where Don Draper is discussing how to sell the Kodak slide carousel. He says this, but he could just as well be speaking of memory.
I have often bragged about being a fabulist. One who makes up everything. To prove that I do not make up EVERYTHING: here is a photo of me standing beside The Stairs That Lead Nowhere.
https://www.facebook.com/greg.schiller.50?fref=nf&pnref=story
You expose the underbelly of our secret piles … ‘Er I mean lives 😍 Not only can I NOT keep up with the piles, but I have several drawers that are literally empty to heave them in if ‘company’ is coming. Woe to he/she who knocks unexpectedly …
Under the bed is good too. I have even tried sweeping dust and dirt under the carpet. IT WORKS!!
I’ve done under the bed but under the rugs is a new one. Good tip *wink*
Great writing!
Hey, thanks!
To echo MPR, I am forever at the mercy of “the project,” as it/they are endless. This usually requires a strategic relocation of our clutter (which I would argue, unsuccessfully, is mostly hers), to the point where we are now in discussions about buying a shed, to where particularly heinous items can be banished for all time. Pray for me…
I fell in love at first sight with our house – because it came with a 30′ X 60′ shed. Huge mistake!!
So relatable!!! We are recently cleaning out the attic. I think there is a post in my for that! 🙂
Shudder! I am scared to go up in our attic. I think the monster who used to live under my bed moved up there.
You cannot even begin to imagine how much I can relate to this post. A year ago we moved everything from the basement into the garage to begin “the basement project,” aka ripping out paneling carpet, Styrofoam ceiling panels (yes, crazy), etc. and waterproofing the basement. A year later and “the project” is still not done due to various family situations which stole away our time and focus. Most of the basement stuff in the garage has not been viewed/used in a year. Perhaps we don’t need it. More and more I want less stuff. The basement seems a good place to start.
The Project…… hmmmm, sound like an essay idea. Believe me, we have all been there.
I cannot even begin to tell you how many projects we’ve done on this house. The kitchen remains…after the basement and after we fill that space where we removed the brick chimney six years ago…
Very funny. Seems like we all have our piles hidden somewhere, some obvious, others not so much . But sooner or later our sins all overflow…:)
It reminds me of Portrait Of The Artist As A Prematurely Old Man by Ogden Nash. Clutter is definitely a sin of omission.
I love this. I have had stuff tossed down the stairs at/to/for me to deal with.
It’s called “motivation by dramatic flair”
I used to leave pennies on our dresser. I put other change in a bank, but pennies in a pile. One day, she filled my shoes with them.
Hilarious!
This has to be one of the funniest stories I’ve ever read on clutter. The Stairs that Lead Nowhere… hilarious! That could be the title of a book on the phenomenon of clutter which my husband and I were just waxing philosophic about this morning. This article just confirms my fervent belief that clutter has energy and if not full-blown consciousness at least sub-consciousness: it moves here and there throughout the house, shifting its weight and presence from place to place. It wants/needs to make itself known.
Of course you are right. But here I covered only the cold and indifferent geological forces. I hadn’t the courage to address the clutter that is possessed by evil spirits. No one who does their writing in a basement would attempt that.
How do people stay married?
They crave punishment.
My husband and I have suffered each other’ for 45 years this coming August. Doesn’t look like we’re getting off the hook. He still looks the same to me!