If you walked through my house you would be amazed at how neat everything is: A place for everything and everything in its place. Except for a thin coating of dog and cat hair, it’s remarkably clean too.
But lurking behind this deceptive exterior order is a secret life of clutter.
Here’s the truth: Clutter increases exponentially. I know this from living in my house for 27 years.
No matter how many truckloads of outdated and broken or just plain unwanted stuff I’ve had carted away, the remaining clutter somehow multiplies and fills my drawers, my closets, my cellar, my garage, my file cabinets (and my mind!) with more and more clutter.
I even had a carpenter come in and install upper and lower poles in my closets, thinking that would give breathing space to the dozens of shirts and pants jammed together inside.
But instead of closets like you see on HGTV, I soon had not one but two levels of jammed together stuff.
Unintended consequence: The cat could now reach the clothes on the lower level and pull some down to make a comfy little nest on the floor.
It’s not that I had never seen neatness.
My 88-year-old Uncle Walter had a great way of organizing his workbench. He took a bunch of old pickle jars and nailed their metal lids to a two-by-four that hung over the work area. He filled each jar with a different species of metal junk — nails and screws, tacks and rivets, nuts and bolts and anonymous tiny metal junk — and then screwed the jars back onto the lids.
In other words, he could see at a glance where everything was.
When I set up my own workbench. I rejected that idea as old-fashioned and risky because of the glass pickle jars. Instead, I used coffee cans. But they took up space, so I built makeshift shelves only as wide as a coffee can. Gradually, as I accumulated the cans and their shelves, the space on my workbench shrank until it was more like a large shelf itself.
And unlike Uncle Walter’s pickle jars, I couldn’t see what was inside the coffee cans. That meant I had to leave “some items” out on the bench for easy access, making the bench even narrower and less useful. Soon “some items” became more items. More items then became buried in piles of items, and finally the whole method of organization fell apart in my impatience and annoyance every time I heaved a wrench or a hammer or a broken part of a project back on the bench.
All this has convinced me that there is a genetic component to clutter that makes it multiply the minute its maker attempts to persuade it to adopt an orderly process called neatness.
Take my kitchen drawer, which has everything in it from Scotch tape to electrical tape, Gorilla Glue and extra hammers, screwdrivers and the missing pieces from light fixtures or whatever.
I have organized that drawer three or four times over the last 27 years and it looked great for a day or two until I put “something else” into it. “Something else” led to something else and that drawer became a kind of game in my head: I “know” in my mind’s eye what is “in there ” and if I just rake my fingers through it long enough it will turn up. It’s almost like hide-and-seek
I have been promising to organize that drawer again for months now. But I know I will throw something away to make everything fit neatly, and then I will regret having thrown away exactly what I am convinced I will need sometime in the future
And besides, neatness isn’t everything. Quantity reigns. I can fit more stuff in that drawer if it is chaotic mess than I ever could if it were neat.
And let’s not even talk about my “digital drawer” in the dining room china cabinet, with the dinosaur bones of Polaroid and digital cameras and flip-open cellphones and dozens of tangled wires snaked together, surely breeding into dozens more wires the minute I close the drawer and am not watching
And the linen closet? Forget that. Kleenex boxes, toilet paper and dozens of mismatched pillowcases and sheets are constantly falling out when I open that door.
I love watching HGTV and the programs featuring modern houses with walk-in closets the size of my bedroom. My experience teaches me that, if I had such a closet, it would become a breeding ground for shirts and jackets and sweaters that I just can’t bear to part with but wear only once a year, if that often. I still have a leather vest I hitchhiked across America in — in 1971.
My Android phone recently sent me a message saying, “You have created too many files.” I went to “settings” and clicked on “device maintenance” and selected “clear.”
Voila! The files are gone
Maybe the “smart houses” they’re building today, with their internet-connected automated systems, will offer such a feature: a “device maintenance” button that removes clutter from the house by simply hitting “clear.”
Voila!
There goes the charm of my secret life of clutter.
Paul Keane lives in Hartford.