Stewart Alison - Junk: Digging Through Americas Love Affair with Stuff

Put it in the basement.

E VERYONE IN OUR FAMILY said those words at least two or three times a year. Maybe more. OK, definitely more. And that was over a period of nearly fifty years.

For me, it started with high school textbooks. Just weeks after I graduated, my parents moved. They packed up twenty-seven years of their life, and my books, and sent it all about six exits down the New Jersey Turnpike and into a spacious brick home in a leafy small town. I went off to Brown and my stuff went to Princeton. That was 1984.

When I made return trips home from college my folks would ask me if I wanted to take any of my texts with me. Id always told my parents, Not right now, but I assured them I would get the books out of the basement soon.

I am not sure why I wanted to keep those books. Somewhere in my mind I assumed Id need to refer to Miltons Paradise Lost at some point in my post-collegiate life. I also stashed away, among other things, some faux Wedgewood embossed low-ball glasses that belonged to my grandmother. She used them for sweet tea. I planned on using them for cocktails.

Over the course of the next ten years I used my parents basement as a personal storage space. I was living in an apartment the size of a goldfish aquarium, so Mom and Dad kept my books and the newly anointed barware in the basement alongside my Michael Jackson Bad LPas in long-playing record, for those readers born after the O. J. Simpson car chase. Of course that twelve-inch plastic disc would be valuable one day. I am not sure to whom I thought I might sell it, but hey, you never know. I really had planned to learn how to hawk things on eBay rather than just bidding.

My sister had plenty of stuff in my parents basement, too. She left behind a few yearbooks and a wedding dress. Her old dollhouse was saved for her daughters to enjoy one day. They both now have graduate degrees. Mostly, the basement was a place to stuff our stuff. We, everyone in my family, would put things down there that we believed we would get to one day, possibly need one day, or possibly give away one day.

One day.

One day came and went a thousand times over while everything in the basement stayed put until 2012. That was the year my sister and I had to clean out our late parents home to sell it. I knew it would be difficult to sift through their things and relive so many memories while being confronted with the fact that they were no longer around to remember with us. After the flower arrangements and funerals, the thank-you notes and the tears, there was a practical matter at hand: the house. Which meant, the basement.

The first days of the clean out were fairly easy. Mom and Dad both had great taste in clothes, so bags and bags of suits, shoes, purses, and ties went to charitable groups like Dress for Success and The Clothes Closet for college seniors who cant afford new interview suits. Most of the sheets and towels went to shelters set up after Hurricane Sandy. Boxes of books were donated, all except for my great grandfathers Harvard Classics; Id had my eye on those since I was eleven.

After the initial flurry of activity, my sister and I finally acknowledged the elephant in the roomor rather, the elephant that was the basement. It had been an unspoken issue from day one. Maybe we thought it would go away if we didnt talk about it. When getting a face full of the reality of your parents death, on some level these kinds of unreasonable thoughts seem plausible.

Walking through the house youd never know about the subterranean level. The first two floors were wide-open spaces, walls painted a soft white with eggshell finish. There werent a lot of decorations or tchotchkes, just a few simple things like a hand-carved sailboat. On the walls there were paintings by R. C. Gorman depicting serene Native American women, seated and wrapped in colorful blankets. The kitchen was white. Completely white: Counters. Appliances. Floors. White floors in a kitchen that my mother mopped herself well into her eighties. The couches in the living room and family room were white too. It was all so very tasteful and orderly. A stranger would never know what lurked below.

I didnt like going into the basement. Even walking by the door gave me the creeps. For some reason I began to equate it with the attic crawl space in the scene in The Sixth Sense when the little kid who sees dead people gets pulled in and roughed up by a pissed-off ghost. When I walked past the basement on the way to the powder room, I kept my eyes focused straight ahead.

This was a fairly recent phobia for me. When I was younger, I loved going down there to see if my Nancy Drew books were still stacked in a corner or to sift through old photos of the family in Mexico circa 1971. But over time the basement stopped being a family museum and became a family mausoleum. It wasnt a hoarding situation. Or a garbage situation. It was a junk situation.

Day one. Game face on. Id psyched myself up. It was going to be a long slog. I would eat the previously mentioned elephant one bite at a time. I flicked on the light switch just inside the door and walked down the curved stairwell and arrived at the final landing and looked around. And then I ran back up.

My second approach was more successful. I created a new paradigm: this was my job. I was an executor of an estate, being paid to deal with all matters. I had a time frame to get this done, so I better get to it. But first Id need tools and backup.

I went to one of those giant home improvement barns and walked the aisles looking for supplies. I wasnt exactly sure what I would need so I went with my gut. I bought bagsZiploc, contractor, and recycling. Rope. Labels. Storage bins. More bags. Duct tape. Plastic gloves. Flashlights. I am surprised I wasnt stopped and questioned at checkout about my motives given that my shopping cart would have fulfilled the punch list of a first-time abductor.

Once I assembled all my tools I felt I was ready. All I needed was a support team. My sister and my friend Silvia were on board. My sister lived out of state, so we agreed to meet once a month for a long weekend of cleaning out until the basement was barren. In between our intensive weekend sessions Silvia and I would work on our own.

All three of us were at the first session. Our spirits were good for the first eight hours. There were some big laughs. I found my mothers charge card for the now defunct Bambergers department store, only it wasnt any old credit card: across the top it said HOMEMAKERS CARD. Try giving out one of those in 2015. There were other finds worthy of a time capsule. A billfold with francs and lira. A toy bank that looked like a one-foot crayon. A Life magazine from the year I was born. In one day we filled ten bags full of giveaways and another ten full of trash, and had made a few piles that werent quite identifiable yet. After day one, full of warm fuzzies, tears, and a few Oh, wow moments, we walked back up the stairs satisfied. We went out to dinner, had some wine, and felt like we were on our way.