A few days ago I ran five miles and began sorting boxes. Gary emptied the attics last month. Six months ago I began running again. Two years ago I decided enough was enough and I would eat better and lose some weight. We began isolating from Covid in March 2020.

All the boxes stored in the north and south attic went into the largest bedroom. Then we emptied the huge closet in that room and everything from under the bed came out.

The goal is to clear this room by my birthday on the 17th of October. (I will be 70.) It is the largest bedroom in the house, about fifteen or sixteen feet square. Our oldest son had it last. My step-grandmother, Genevieve, had most of her looms and all her yarn in that room. Her bed and dressers too. Now it’s stuff with only a narrow path around boxes.

The Kitchen Queen in the far corner of the room is going away. The fir church pew that is hidden behind (and over and under) boxes will stay. One of the hanging racks leaning on the mattress in the middle of the photo, probably not the one I made of zebrawood, will go on the wall where the Kitchen Queen was. Gary had already moved four chairs to the living room. One will move back into the room, when there is space for it again. One of those chairs will go away, despite being beautiful and family.

Christmas stuff went back into the closet on the top shelf. A lot of Christmas stuff. So many Christmas decorations! The feather wreath is in its special container and on the closet floor. We put that over the fireplace every year (thank you, Rin). Six boxes of family photos and negatives dating back to the nineteenth century made a new stack in the north end of the closet.

The Christmas stuff will be sorted in December when I take it all out, decide what I want to use, and then discard the rest. I already gave our sons most of the “family” stuff. The five-foot stack of family photos are more problematic. I am the only person alive, I fear, who can identify the who and where of most of them. My aunt Vera and great grandmother Rosetha, my mother’s cousin Virginia Smith, my dad as a child. Sorting photos is a longer-term project. I am not keen to work on them, but I might manage that, one bin at a time. Later. Much later. I have empty albums I could assemble for each of our sons or grandchildren. Only one of our sons has a sentimental attachment to such stuff and I do not want to further burden him.

There are still boxes and bins of stuff from when I was teaching. I might simply discard them all. Gary is an essential element of my ability to do this. He always checks trash, just in case, and will rescue things that should be kept. He has no sentimental attachments to my stuff.

And then the items that probably should be sold. There are prints and magazines and even some furniture. I still have jewelry to sell for when we replace the roof. I found The Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine from July 1889, sat back, and opened the front cover to the Table of Contents. Maybe I would recognize a name?

Second article listed is by Mary Hallock Foote, “The Last Trip In: Pictures of the Far West VIII.” Mary Hallock Foote was a nineteenth century writer, artist, and journalist who wrote about the West while following her mining engineer husband to mining camps. This article is about teamsters (the ones who drove teams of mules), their character, their cursing, their diminishing routes as rail lines take over cartage, and how their 16 or 18 or 20 mules carry the last load to remote places before winter closes everything down. It’s just over two pages with a full page engraving after her drawing of a mule train. I wish I had the other installments, but alas…

Foote is the author plagiarized by Wallace Stegner in The Angle of Repose. (The title metaphor was Foote’s and most of her life details about birth, education, travel, etc. that Stegner used. He lifted whole paragraphs from her writing in his novel. Then he introduced a scandal to his fictional character’s life that did not belong to her. Stegner failed to revise his character to make her his and also failed in his acknowledgements to credit her by name or to cite her directly as source, except for thanking one relative with a different last name. Other relatives objected both before and after publication of the Pulitzer-winning novel. I have found Stegner did this in his other novels, using and abusing sources without properly crediting them. A neighbor explained Stegner “was a historian.” Perhaps, but I was trained to always document my sources. And unacknowledged use of another person’s words in plagiarism, which is theft. Google her and Stegner and you will find articles going back decades that review this controversy.)

So our sorting goal is to make a decisions about four boxes each day we are in the—tossing, giving away, and storing—till they are gone. There are about 30 large bins plus a few that are huge and some smaller bins and boxes in that room. I think we might manage. Maybe. I’ll let you know.