Basement Blues
I’ve been working off and on working in my basement to clean and rid it of accumulated items from the past twenty years or so. Things that weren’t worn enough to toss have now been tossed. Things that haven’t been used, tossed. Things that have been stored for others, I gave options and some of those got tossed. There were plastic shopping bags of newspapers. I imagine nearly twenty in all and most of them were incinerated. This was written in 2018 and the hoarding has resumed.
I burned a coffee table and two end tables that had become scarred and wobbly. Some small scraps of wood joined the pile and helped to bring on the global warming that scientists have lied about. An old plastic cooler minus its lid sent a smoke signal to be saved, so I tossed on two foam rubber pillows from an old couch, but to no avail. They ascended into the heavens on dark billows. In their place is a patio table and a dining table with chairs.
Old pieces of warped plywood became part of the funeral pyre, as did some magazines, a few rags, and other odds and ends. My daughter, Anna and her boyfriend, James, said that they got a call from NASA saying they could see my signal. It was bright that evening they commented, but I thought it was more like the rubbish heap outside of Jerusalem, called Gahanna; the place of eternal fire.
I certainly made a blaze that I fed over several days as I uncovered more and more things that had lost their usefulness. I have saved boxes on shelves. You never know when a solid cardboard box will come in handy.
The original reason for ridding the basement of unnecessary things, and believe me there is still a lot left, was that my basement was a wet basement. A slow trickle of water would slide across one side of the basement and sometimes cover the floor when it  rained. I decided that I wanted to keep it dry and have a usable basement.
I hired a well known company to come in on a contingency plan. If an opening came up, they would give me a week’s notice to get everything away from the walls, so the workers can open a channel on the inside floor to arrange all seepage into a sump area and be pumped outside. The remedy worked. I now have a dry basement and that is why the accumulation of items has returned and hoarding now has returned. Who can throw away a good box? I need to start the de-cluttering again.