Skeletons in my Closet

The other day I sat down and realized that I have nine closets in my house.  Nine!  I was absolutely floored.  It was quickly followed by a series of anxiety inducing thoughts.  1. That doesn’t count the pantry, the storage room, or the tops of several high places where I like to stash things.  2. Each one of those nine closets is disheveled or outright messy.  3. I hide things in one of them and have to hip-chuck the door to get it to close.  Sheesh.  It’s a good thing I’m Canadian.

The biggest problem is that nine closets is a lot to tackle.  And I’m short.  Okay, I’m not really short, but I’m short enough that when I put on a pair of high heels and walk through my house I realized that I’ve missed an entire aspect of dusting because I’m too short to see all the dusty surfaces 6–10 cm higher up.  It also means that the top shelf of each closet is basically impossible for me to see without a double-step stool.    

It’s really pathetic. 

What makes it more pathetic is that I like throwing things away.  Every time I go into one of my kids’ rooms, I take away at least one more bag of garbage than what was in their garbage can.  Why can’t I get that kind of control over a closet?  A closet is a twentieth the size of a room.  Why am I such a weenie?

I’ll tell you why.  Big stuff.  You can’t throw big stuff in the garbage in Edmonton.  If you want to throw away something big, you have take it to the Eco Center.  Have you ever driven past an Eco Center in Edmonton on a Saturday?  It’s like someone put a huge ‘Everything is Free’ sign on top of a Tim Horton’s.  And the lineups in front of Timmy’s are colossal every day of the week.  In front of the Eco Center – they wrap outside the parking lot and down the block on a street where the speed limit is 60 km/h.

So, the things clogging my closets aren’t small stuff.  They’re huge, and useless and dead … almost like … dare I say it?  Skeletons. 

Yes.  That is what they are like.  I’ve got bedside tables that don’t have legs on them anymore, TVs that don’t turn on, scanners (too many scanners), old speakers, silk plants with all the leaves ripped off them, and computer parts (too many computer parts).  You know what – the advancement of the smart phone will save millions.  And when I say millions, I mean millions of square centimeters in everyone’s closets.  Even if you have ten smart phone carcasses in your closet, they won’t take up more space than a box of Kleenex.