Living With Less: Week 14

by Amy L. Hatch

There is an odd assortment of items sitting on the floor of my garage this week.

Here is a plastic piece of pizza, a lone remnant of what was once a set of play food. Here is a plastic storage bag holding extra pillows and blankets for guests we never have, and here is what remains of our Christmas tree, sopping wet on the bottom and dry on the top.

Our basement flooded Monday afternoon during the sudden storm that brought an inch of rain in about 15 minutes. The kids were scared by the cracking thunder and the spiky bolts of lightening, and when it was over I rushed outside to get some photos of the street, which looked more Venetian canal than suburban thoroughfare.

Then I tried to get online, and when I couldn’t, I went down the cellar steps to check on our Internet connection. That’s when my brain tried to wrap itself around the fact that I had stepped in almost four inches of cold water.

Our basement isn’t as bad as it used to be. My husband and I invested significant time in paring down the junk we hung on to. We tried to limit it to the very sentimental, like family photos and a few mementos from high school and college, and the necessary, like tools and furniture waiting to be used again.

Slowly, though, “stuff” crept back into our lives — and the basement. The carefully culled brand-name kids’ clothes, waiting to be sold at the right season. The craft supplies I always promise Emmie we’ll find time to use, and we never do. The fancy baby swing I keep saying I’m going to post on Craigslist.

Stuff we don’t need anymore, and stuff we had to pay a clean-up crew to cart out of the basement and sort after it marinated in the Urbana rain runoff overnight.

I surveyed the contents of the basement — now in the garage — and shook my head at my own foolishness. Sometimes I hang on to stuff because it symbolizes some important part of my life, and of course the baby items are laden with sentimental moments. And if I’m honest, all that stuff makes me feel safe somehow, a kind of buffer against the uncertainty of the future.

I’m a hoarder in the making.

This week I am being forced to throw stuff out. It’s ruined, there’s no place to donate it — and there’s no excuse to put it off, either, like I do when I promise my husband I’ll get the stuff out of the house and then it sits around for another six months.

Or a year. Or several years.

We got lucky, we didn’t lose anything that’s really precious, and the basement is filled with industrial-strength fans and a huge dehumidifier as I write this, getting nice and dry. In a strange way I’m grateful for the flood, for reminding me of what’s really essential and renewing my commitment to live with less.

Related posts:

1. Living With Less: Where To Donate in Champaign-Urbana