By Pam “Gates” Johnson
It’s not spring, so why has the spring cleaning bug landed on my shoulder and begun to scream in my ear? It is telling me … PURGE! CLEAN! DOWNSIZE! I ignored the screams until they started to drown out everything and take over most of my waking thoughts. Okay. I get it. The time has come for me to get off my lazy rear end and do some serious purging.
The place to start was my pantry. I have a little chest freezer that has lived there for a few decades. The problem with a chest freezer is that you (meaning me) put stuff in it. Then you put more stuff on top of it. Then more stuff goes in. By then, you (meaning me) have forgotten what was on the bottom layer. There was probably a package or two of hamburger in there, but since I couldn’t see it and didn’t want to dig through three or four layers of frozen stuff, it was just easier to buy a new package.
And so it went for years.
I’ve been talking about wanting to get an upright freezer and finally just did it. Now the problem was, what to do with the old freezer and the three or four hundred pounds of frozen stuff inside? My granddaughter had mentioned that she needed a little freezer. I told her if she took the stuff inside it, she could have my little freezer. All she and her boyfriend had to do was come get it.
Ordered a new upright and it was delivered. Granddaughter and boyfriend arrived to take the old one. The new problem was, how do we get the loaded freezer into the back of their truck?
Thursday night came, which is Family Dinner Night when the fam come to my house for a meal. That meant an extra two big strong men to help with the freezer move. All the men agreed that there was no way they could move it while fully loaded. Nephew suggested he pull the backhoe up to the pantry window and all the food be thrown into the bucket. Once the freezer was in the truck, he could dump the food right into it.
Granddaughter thought that idea had merit, but they continued to throw around ideas. Finally, it was decided that my son would unload the freezer and throw each item to my granddaughter. She would decide whether it was a keeper or a thrower. Keepers went into a big Rubbermaid bin, throwers went into the trash.
And so it began.
Oh, the things that were unearthed. Containers of leftover soup, frozen applesauce, tomato sauce, pizza sauce, lasagna and pizza portions, venison, sausage, roasts, steaks, even a 10-pound prime rib roast (which I kept). Once everything was vetted, out went the freezer to the truck, the food got reloaded, freezer got plugged into an extension cord (the kids were spending the night). Whew!
I have probably mentioned that I have been in this house since 1975. There have been some major changes and renovations over the years. Best guess is the kitchen was overhauled somewhere in the early to mid 1990s. New cabinets and counters and floors and paint and such.
Well, the eye-level and above cabinets are the ones that get used the most. The bottom cabinets are another story. Since I was now fully engaged in purging, I set my sights on the lower cabinets.
The cabinets were mostly full of pots and pans and casserole baking dishes and such. How many 8-inch square cake pans does one single old lady need? There were at least five or six, not counting the new ones I now use. Cup cake pans? Big, medium, and small with 6 to up to 48 cupcake holes. Again, how many do I need?
A full set of Revere Ware copper-bottom frying pans with lids. I have a good set of Calphalon, so don’t need those.
Eight million plastic lids with no containers to go with them? A potato ricer. An apple peeler. Lasagna pans. A few things were totally mysterious and unidentifiable. Of course, there were various old papers, manuals for appliances long gone, checkbooks from banks that no longer exist, and just plain junk.
Granddaughter and I went through everything, and she decided to take maybe 20%. I kept about 8%. That left a bunch of stuff. My next step is to go through the remaining 72% and figure out what goes to Granny’s and what goes to the dump.
Now that stuff is down to a manageable amount, I am having pull-out drawers installed in the cabinets so things don’t get pushed to the back, never to be seen until the next purge, which will probably occur somewhere around the year 2050. The pull-outs will be installed next week.
It’s pretty quiet here right now. Granddaughter and boyfriend left around noon. They wanted to miss the traffic jam around JBLM on a Friday. A friend who is also a handyman, came over and helped me order the pull-out drawers for the kitchen cabinets. Things that need to be put away are in big tubs, pushed out of the way.
All is right with the world, except that the new recliner I bought last spring and that I sleep in broke in August and La-Z-Boy can’t get a tech guy out here to fix it until October 30th!
Sometimes you just can’t win for losing.
