Something amazing happened yesterday. We cleaned out our garage. I use the “we” in the royal sense, because all I did was sit there in front of the door and tell people they were doing things wrong. “No! Don’t throw that roll of fabric away! It was only slightly nibbled by rats.”

I feel the need to clean out the garage every 10 years whether it needs it or not. The same schedule as I have for washing my car.

And here’s the thing: We have very nice, deep shelves in the garage that can hold everything we put in there. But, somehow (kids) things that were once on the shelves (kids) mysteriously end up in random piles on the floor (kids), eventually making it impossible to even walk in there.

I bought color-coded bins to hold holiday decorations. Black-and-orange for Halloween. Red-and-green for Christmas. But apparently those were considered merely a suggestion by the rest of my family, because the random piles in the garage include all the Christmas ornaments and plastic skulls that once resided in those bins.

I have designated shelves on one side for our vast collection of camping equipment, that includes four tents, two stoves and three coolers. Why do we have three coolers? Because the garage was so messy, I would just buy a new one rather than try to find the old ones. This is not good money management.

On the other side, there are shelves designated for beach equipment: Umbrella, boogie boards, pails and shovels and such.

Would you like to guess how many of these items were in their proper place when we started cleaning yesterday? If you answered “None,” you would be correct. Because they were in the Everest-sized piles on the floor, for reasons I cannot fathom. Except that none of the kids putting things away could be bothered to spend  the extra 1.1 nanoseconds to put them on the shelf rather than just chucking them onto the floor. Or the space formerly known as the floor, which had begun to resemble Disneyland’s Matterhorn, except less fun.

See, here’s the thing. I recently tried medicinal cannabis therapy which held out hope for slowing the growth of my cancer. For three months. To cut to the chase, it didn’t work, unfortunately, except to give me a huge yen to listen to Led Zeppelin. You probably think that’s a joke, but I’m dead serious.

Anyway, I stopped using the massive medicinal doses of cannabis (which were not as much fun as you might think) and once my brain fog cleared, I looked around my house and shrieked. See, while I was five miles high, my house had become the repository of every piece of junk you could ever imagine all over the living room, kitchen and hallway. Thing we bought from Costco that were never put away. Empty cardboard boxes that needed to be broken down and put in the recycling bin.

When you add in the 20 cases of wine I bought for Curly Girl’s wedding that are scattered all over the living room, my house essentially looks like an Amazon warehouse on crack. I didn’t notice any of this when I was high, in case you are interested. I just sat around drooling and listening to hair bands.

Anyway, none of this clutter could be put in the garage because — as you have surmised — it was already full. So, cleaning out the garage was the first step in taking back my house from the demons of mess.

I don’t really know why anyone would do this for me, but my friend Ana — who recently moved — drove all the way up from San Diego County to help my son, Cheetah Boy, clean it all out. Think about this. How many friends do you have who would help you clean out your garage? And how many would drive 80 miles to do it? She wouldn’t even let me buy her gas. Anyway, I’m the luckiest person alive to have friends like that.

I’ve been feeling rather weak and tired lately, so my only contribution to this effort was to sit on the unused shower chair we’d just pulled out, and direct them as to what to do with the various items that appeared —many of which I’d been looking for since the Nixon administration.

“Wow, there’s the high school literature textbook I had to pay for because Curly Girl lost it 8 years ago.” Trash. They have probably banned half the books in it by now.

I also found a bin of priceless family photos that mysteriously ended up there, because I would never ever put those in the garage. We had to take a break from organizing to go through them for a few minutes. Dang. My kids were cute. I also found the scrapbook filled with our foreign money collection, which has probably about 100 types of money in it, including from countries that don’t even use it anymore, like Italian lira. (Now they use Euros).

Right now, there’s an immense pile of stuff on my curb, waiting for the city truck to come and pick it up. I’m hoping they’ll take it all. If not, I guess I’ll call a junk dealer. It definitely won’t be going back into the garage.

Next up: Moving the junk from the house into the newly organized garage. I’ll keep you posted.

Want to write to me? Hit me up at [email protected].

Related links

Marla Jo Fisher: I must like you, my house is a mess
Marla Jo Fisher: No, kids, Led Zeppelin is not a mineral
Marla Jo Fisher: Costco, the land of the giant carts
Marla Jo Fisher: Aw, rats! Why did they have to pick my attic?
I quit being my kids’ maid