Coming out of the closet

Part of it was my embarrassment over my now-confirmed lack of homemaking stills, part of it was the drenching downpour over the weekend that didn’t allow for many activity options. Whatever my motivation, I spent a good chunk of Saturday and Sunday – wait for it – purging junk from the kids’ closets and my laundry room.

It took about seven hours to just accomplish those two tasks, but in the meantime, I managed to find a lot of old and weird stuff. Turns out, when you pick up crap off the floor and go through the crap on the shelves, you can uncover even older and far-flung crap.

Like my daughter’s baptism shoes (should I really use that as a segway with the previous “crap”-filled sentence?) which were mixed up with her brother’s soccer shorts. And speaking of soccer shorts, my first grader is only in his third year of AYSO, but he has inexplicably amassed seven pair of black soccer shorts.

In the laundry room, I went through some bags of clothes my friend had given me a while back, filled with things her kids had outgrown. Kenneth Cole shoes for my first grader, Jack – not a scuff on them. A darling Nordstrom sweater for Annie, with cute little bows and dogs that is a definite step up from the Target stuff I buy her. Fleece pullovers for both of them, and a set of ski gloves, tags still on. A Christmas dress in her size – bonus!

Free shopping was way cool, and so was the shocked look on hubby’s face when he saw that I had bagged up four bags of our leftover clothes to donate to charity. He was even more thrilled that he was able to see the laundry room floor for the first time in years.

Oddest discovery? A box of food I had stored away in the linen closet. I tend to be a neurotic Nelly in times of global crises, and as such, have squirreled away rations in perilous moments, like after 9/11 and during the hysteria a couple years ago about a bird flu pandemic.

As it turns out, the box of food had cans of fruit and some baby food in there that expired in 2002. I remembered with a cringe that I bought it all in anticipation of Y2K. We’d sit in the cold, dark house eating pineapple and Ritz

I guess that explains why the case of canned fruit was black on the bottom, and left a black mark on the floor.

Of course, when I left the box of rancid food downstairs, the kids immediately descended. “Animal crackers! Cool! Can I have some?” They were ready to rip open the animal cracker box, which probably contained cookies with botulism levels greater than any terrorist could put into them, but I screamed and grabbed it away from them.

Now that’s Homeland Security. And tomorrow I’m going to Costco to replenish. I’ll just avoid the canned fruit.

###