Where does it all come from? Answering from our home, there’s only one place: homeschooling. Before we ventured into this mess (and homeshcooling is messy work), I confess that our home had its share of nonsensical items. It’s unavoidable with four children. You know, a chair from a Fisher Price playhouse that was donated or sold, say six years ago. Or, a plastic flying saucer from one of those Discovery Toys shooters you paid a fortune for, which broke right after the warranty ran out. Or, a crooked lamp that’s missing the upper globe, but you don’t want to toss it because it still works and Auntie So-and-So gave it to you. Or, a missing piece to a puzzle that you threw out because you gave up trying to find the missing piece. The regular stuff. We’ve all got some. However, I do declare that ours used to be a controlled plethora of such things. Every year, I would dutifully have a garage sale to weed out the treasures meant for someone else’s home. It’s amazing what people will buy. It’s even more amazing what people will take from the free box. Anyway, what did not sell was packed in boxes for a local charity. What was not worth packing in boxes went to the landfill. My husband wisely put his foot down about allowing none of it back into our home. Good man! Life was simpler then. But I swear that after one year of homeschooling, we had more junk than we even knew existed! Yikes bikes! The problem was that now I did not have time for the annual garage sale. Well, maybe I could have found the time, but after nine months of lesson planning and careful completion of said plans, I was pooped. I was ready for a break. A nice, long summer break. The kind I used to have pre-kids when I taught high school. You can take the teacher out of the classroom for temporary retirement, but you can’t take the yearning for summer vacation out of her. No sir! I love summer! This has been my mode of operandi for the last decade. Consequently, things tend to pile up wherever we can stack them. I pause for a moment of pride. The one thing I do tackle at the end of each year is the school room, whether that be an actual room or some corner of the basement. I just have to. It needs to be weeded out to fit in the next year’s curriculum materials. I have done this for ten years now. I used to haul all my used curricula to the local homeshooling conference. I would make a tidy sum, and it was worth the ten percent donation to the group to sell it there. However, long about year seven, I met some really nice homeschoolers who just happened to need all of my used stuff for their children, who were a bit younger than mine, so I sold it right out of my schoolroom. This arrangement was heaven! Elsewhere, however, stuff just starts to accumulate, little by little. It’s as if it is multiplying like rabbits or something. I seriously do not remember any of it coming in, but it’s here now. UGH! This year I am faced with having to do something about it. It’s been eight years since our last garage sale, and we need room for the two college girls’ treasures. They each have their own plethora, which includes but is not limited to the following: two microwaves, one coffee pot, a futon, a small refrigerator, some stackable shelves, a couple of under-the-bed-storage boxes, three laundry baskets, various throw rugs, towels, boxes of shoes, and more odds and ends than I know I sent them to college with. All this takes space. A whole room, I’ve discovered. Where did they get all this stuff? Oh, wait, I know the answer. One is a born shopper, and the other acquired a whole car load of orphans when her roommate ditched college practically in the middle of the night, and this lucky child of ours hates to throw anything out. Lucky us. Not! So anyway, as I write this column, one of our sons is carting arm loads to the garage, and he’s not happy about it. He’s neither a shopper nor a saver, so none of the junk is his. But he’s got the muscles, so he’s got the job! Once it’s all said and done, I’ll probably slip him a few bucks. After all, I firmly believe that collecting and purging should be a family venture. Why should Mom have all the “fun”, and why should the pack rats get all the money when they aren’t even around to carry it up from the basement?

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