When we recently had the house torn up and put back together, I saw it as sort of a maturation process. Until then, the old house on Rusty Hinge Road was a modified version of the previous owner’s decorating tastes. Sure, we painted and put up shelves when we first moved in, but when we redid the bathrooms to our own specifications, the house was officially ours.
This, in my mid-50s mind meant growth, which translated to Melissa and I needing to purge the pile of pointless pollution that we had collected over the decade. How did this happen? First, there was the doubling of debris when we merged our two households and second there is our mutual, almost pathological hording disorders, also known as “collecting.”
We had postcards, pots, paintings, empty plastic nut jars, brown paper bags, Clementine boxes, shoe boxes, shoes, hats, food processing equipment, sheets, sheets, towels and more towels, etc. and more etc.
Our initial thought was to get rid of a bunch of this junk, and regular readers might remember the under-attended tag sale we held last summer. In spite of our best intentions, most of the stuff stayed on the porch. We couldn’t even get the local roving bands of teenage punks and wise guys to steal the stuff. So, as prearranged, nothing went back into the house. It went into the big Volvo and off to Goodwill.
As a natural consequence to our recent bathroom renovations, Melissa and I discussed purchasing new towels. Grown-ups, it could be argued, had towels that “went” with the décor. Up until this discussion, we had a grouping of mismatched, leftover linens, selected from the mountain that had formed in the basement. I agreed to the new towel purchase, but had to include a clause about the aforementioned mountain of reject towels in the basement.
“We’ve got to get rid of some of the junk around here.” I said.
I knew that’d never happen. Now and then I vow to myself to open the Bilco door to the cellar, back up the big Volvo and fill the cargo bay with some of the stuff that waits, neatly folded and untouched for years, and lug it off somewhere.
Our new, Egyptian cotton towels arrived, and Melissa hung them on the towel bars in the master bath. They were luscious, soft and the right color. Very grown up. I don’t, in fact, remember every buying a towel in my life, but the old bathroom towels ended up in the stack with the others, down in the basement by the washer and dryer.
Then came the day, not long ago, when Melissa and I went to Costco to buy a rotisserie chicken, some mixed nuts and a skid of toilet paper. As we pushed our oversized cart down the aisle, Melissa noticed some towels on sale. Needless to say it was a fancy brand that I had never heard of, let’s say they were “Elite Deluxe” brand.
“Oooh, “cooed Melissa, “Elite Deluxe towels on for only $7.99! What a deal!”
Apparently if I had been up on my towels, I’d have been equally excited.
“Ain’t that a shame?” I said, “and we just got new towels!”
Melissa said, “Oh, you’re right, but that blue goes with our color scheme!”
A week later, while I was stuffing clothing into the washer I noticed two new blue towels on the stack. I would never have noticed but for the shiny, new “Elite Deluxe” tags still on their hems. My initial reaction was to flip my lid but I changed my mind. After all, who was I to throw stones in the basement of my glass house?
I set the washer load to “XL” and waited for the agitator to kick in. It’s been known to run and run and overflow and fill the basement. (Homemoaner, February 2008) The agitator kicked in and I went upstairs and got lost in the usual ongoing rigmarole that fills the hours between sleep. In a day or two, if the opportunity arose, I’d mention the new towels to Melissa.
One fine Saturday, it popped into my head during a debate. I was losing, so I casually mentioned the new “Elite Deluxe” towels. She was surprised that I noticed them, seeing as how there are so many old towels among which they were concealed. I didn’t win our debate, but it was close enough to a draw that we were soon sitting at our respective computers, busily whiling away the rainy day.
At some point Melissa went downstairs for a cup of tea or some cat-related medical emergency. A few minutes she was hollering and hooting so loudly, I thought she had fallen down the stairs.
As I rushed to her side, I realized the washing machine had overflowed. She’d put in the new towels, and in an effort to conserve water and assuage her guilt, pushed the “large load” button and forgot about it. “Large load” is notorious for causing floods and sure enough the water in the basement was more than ankle deep.
I said nothing to Melissa, no words would have made her feel any better or any worse. I turned on the pump, which is set up for just such an event, and in a couple of hours the water had been sucked out the window and into a convenient nearby street grate. We just swept the puddles across the floor and into the big hole in the floor where the pump is installed and moved the soggy cardboard boxes full of unnecessary junk up to higher ground.
Fortunately we had plenty of old towels around to soak up the last of the water.
Fortunately we had plenty of old towels around to soak up the last of the water.
Smug as a bug in a waterlogged rug.
