Detritus

I was standing at the window of the loft… our den or family room, if you will… having just finished ironing some shirts, and I turned and surveyed the room for a moment. It looked like one of those hidden object pictures you see in computer games. Seriously! If there is an empty spot on a table, a shelf, in a corner, I will inevitably fill it with the current object in my hands. Not just me. My whole family does this. There is a place for everything and it happens to be wherever you are standing at the moment.

The loft is an open space, suspended above the living room by some feat of engineering I will never understand, and I suspect it will collapse one day under the weight of all this shit. The initial decorating idea was to create a comfortable space to watch TV. Bookshelves span the length of the overhang from which you can look down on the living room, and the rest of the furniture focuses on that 48”, LED, Smart TV: the source of endless entertainment and earth-shattering news events tucked into one corner of this oddly shaped room.

Under the TV lives the DVR, blue ray player, stereo, turntable, and a subwoofer. Four speakers surround this seating area. Adjacent to the TV assemblage is a cd cabinet. Does that begin to indicate the obsolescent features of the room? I have not listened to a CD in years!

The chaos: a rocking chair drawn right up to the TV screen as if it weren’t clearly visible from across the street!

I'll make my way around in a circle like I learned to do many years ago when I narrated an educational video on How to Clean a Room. (Clearly, I wasn’t paying attention.)

The ironing board is under the window because it is the best source of light. The cooling iron sits on the windowsill along with a can of spray starch and another of sizing. I do not know the difference between starch and sizing or even why I have both, but there they are. The just ironed shirts hang on hangers that hang on the knobs of the cd case. The case is full so many more CDs are piled on top of it. I do not know why we have so many CDs. I only know we no longer listen to any of them since the entire cabinet has been downloaded onto an iPod which we also almost never listen to because now we have Pandora, Spotify and 100 music stations ON THE TV. On the floor next to the cd cabinet are two semi-rolled up yoga mats, three sets of bar bells, and two kettle bells, in case anyone wants to exercise. Hah!

There is a wooden rack that holds a couple of throw blankets, rendered inaccessible by an empty box on top of it that once contained the carafe that came with our new Keurig in case we ever need four cups of coffee instead of one, a pile of clothes for Goodwill, and a yellow dust mop leaning against it in the corner.

Moving to the right, there is the ledge, festooned with some laundry waiting to be carried downstairs, a microwavable heating pad for my neck, a Beats speaker, a salt lamp sitting in a dried puddle of expended salt, a small jar of something (guitar picks?), an African statute of a male drummer (his female counterpart broke several years ago), a stack of blank cds, a container for pens and pencils that my 28 year old son made when he was in elementary school, a wooden peg board game, a stack of blank DVDs, lots of pictures in frames, votive candles, a tiny wooden rocking horse, air freshener, and books that don’t fit on the shelves beneath. The shelves are filled with VHS tapes (we no longer own a VCR), DVDs (I can sum up the technology that has replaced any need to watch a DVD in 3 words: Netflix, Amazon, On-Demand; is that 4 words?) and record albums. Record albums? Yes! TWO SHELVES OF VINYL! Enough said about THAT!

There is an antique café table with two wire chairs. Each chair holds a huge exercise ball, one of which is partially deflated but I can’t find the leak.

And more books… And more knick-knacks… And one entire section devoted to old photos in albums, boxes, envelops, scrap books, all gathering dust, all impossible to deal with. (How can I throw out these pictures?)

I remember when we moved into this empty house and wondered how we would ever fill it. We bought a pick-up truck last summer with delusions of getting medieval and cleaning out the accumulated detritus of 20 years. We have the means! We just need the energy!