My mother is moving to St. Louis next month, to a small apartment. She has lived in a large-ish three bedroom house for twelve years now, and has a crapload of stuff.
It isn't so much that she's a pack-rat, as it is that she hates to throw away useful things. And as an artist, everything is useful in some way. I've seen her hover over a garbage can for twenty minutes, trying to decide if the plastic yoghurt cup really is trash, or if she should wash it and add it to the three feet high stack of plastic yoghurt cups she already has.
She uses them to mix paint.
She hardly ever paints anymore.
She has a stack of plastic yoghurt cups three feet high.
Twenty minutes.
Ok, yes, she's a pack-rat.
She's a generous pack-rat, though. When she has accumulated a boxful of items she can't use, she gives them to me. This really isn't so bad... Jeremy and I don't have much, so I can usually use whatever it is she brings over, but sometimes I'm stumped. Last month she gave me a tiny glass jar with lid that used to hold some kind of kosher sauce. It's too small to really do anything with, and isn't re-sealable, but I held on to that jar for three weeks before deciding I couldn't use it. I am my mother's daughter.
But anyway, she has finally come to terms with the necessity of tossing out the garbage. She IMs me at least once a day, wanting to know if I can use some thirty-year-old tupperware lids (just the lids!) somehow, or if I'd like the broken dehydrator, or if I wouldn't mind driving an hour and a half for a nearly empty package of nori.
So yesterday we drove to her house to help pack things up. Jeremy disappeared into the study immediately after eating, but he wouldn't know how to pack anything, anyway. He's a big smelly boy, and I always do the packing when we move.
We worked in the kitchen. Oh, merciful god. There were some spices in those cabinets that I clearly recall from my childhood. There was a bottle of chocolate amaretto coffee flavoring that I purchased fifteen years ago. A big bottle of Postum, which we bought in 1987, tasted, and hated, which lived on in the very back of the tea cabinet. Two bottles of a vanilla substitute that belonged to my stepfather, who died in 1989. A ptomaine blast from the past, my mother's kitchen cabinets.
Once we got started, Mom really got into throwing stuff away, but she still filled boxes for me to take home.
I have eighteen glass milk bottles filled with pasta, rice, and soda crackers. I have five bottles of bacon bits. I have three boxes of cream of wheat. A billion other assorted items fill the ten boxes she crammed into my car. Twenty three 1/4 lb packages of Gevalia coffee. Thirty six boxes of tea. Two bottles of olive oil in decorative containers. Two jugs of lamp oil. A gallon of hulled walnuts. Half a package of coconut flakes. Two sticks of butter and a pack of cream cheese. And so much more.
Two weeks ago, I had asked her to price a few items for me the next time she went shopping at the wholesale club. Instead of telling me the prices, she purchased in bulk - which was extremely kind of her, but now I have to find room for twenty pounds of flour, ten pounds of sugar, two pounds of yeast, and fifty pounds of everything else. My kitchen is a tiny, cramped space, about three feet by seven feet. Most of that seven feet is taken up by appliances!
I guess I'll be converting the study closet into a pantry.
I'm not ungrateful, although this does sound like a load of bitching. Nearly everything she plopped into our car, we can use. I'm just a little overwhelmed by the sheer mass of stuff sitting in my kitchen right now.
Five bottles of bacon bits?
