The Grand Purge

Our granddaughter, Miriam, took a class this summer, and when the class ended, she had another few weeks before college. She searched high and low for employment in Atlanta to earn money before she left town.

It’s not surprising that none of the applications she filled out resulted in a full-time job. It made sense that no store owner would train her for only one month’s work.

Miriam and I discussed the situation, and I offered to pay her to help me tackle the onerous task of cleaning out and organizing the contents of my basement, frequently referred to by my family as The Maze. The aforementioned space is a large “finished” basement room that the previous owner’s teenage son occupied as his own private fiefdom.

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Our daughters used to suggest that we get a tenant to occupy the space (yes, there is a bathroom down there); however, my husband and I have taken advantage of the big room by using it as a repository of things from which we cannot bear to be parted, as well as relics from our daughters’ and grandchildren’s childhood years.

Miriam said she’d help me clean and clear The Maze, but she refused to let me pay her. I cleverly convinced her to accompany me downstairs for a reconnaissance mission to see for herself the cluttered room which she hadn’t visited since she and

I brought her mother’s old Barbie collection upstairs. In other words, our granddaughter had not descended into The Maze for at least 12 years. A lot has happened down there since then.

Miriam, who had magnanimously—but foolishly—refused to let me pay her before she saw the state of The Maze, initially recoiled, then decided, “I’ll do it.” The severity of disarray, and the realization that neither I nor my husband was likely to ever discard anything, convinced her to accept the job. (I’m a collector; he’s a saver. There’s a difference.)

“How much shall I pay you?” I asked, enormously relieved that help was on the way. “Whatever,” Miriam answered, teenager-ly. “Twenty bucks for starters,” I declared, believing that twenty bucks is great pay for my estimation that she’d work for less than an hour before collapsing. I decided to insert a bit of business into the transaction, so I grabbed her hand and shook it to seal the deal.

Miriam benignly accepted that bit of ceremony, probably due to the belief that old people do that sort of thing, then we quickly donned the work gloves and aprons I brought downstairs.

We worked together for a while until my granddaughter stated that she’d do a better job of purging and rearranging if I assumed a spectator role, took a seat on one of the mismatched chairs, and let her do the hands-on work. She said my frequent exclamations of “Miriam, look at this!” and “I haven’t seen this for ten years!” when I reconnected with boxes of favorite books and pottery distracted her from the salaried task at hand.

For Miriam, it was a no-brainer to push the lopsided chest of drawers and stained lampshades into the corner with other discards. She questioned my stash of old washboards, handmade baskets, and midcentury tablecloths, but after negotiations in which I explained their present sentimental worth and future value as antiques, Miriam benevolently let me keep all three groups of treasures.

Then it happened. I have been gathering crystal-centered geodes from Israel for years, and Miriam spotted them. She loves geodes, and when I insisted, she accepted the entire group. A few minutes later, under a crate of toy dinosaurs, Miriam found a bulging bag of stuffed animals. Miriam, owner of two beloved live tabbies, Leo and Wyatt, is a “cat person,” and there must have been at least two dozen fuzzy felines in there.

“Bubbie, I used to play with these!” she cried. “May I keep them?” Instead of the trunk of bellbottoms, madras curtains, and vintage T-shirts, or the cache of vinyl records I had assumed my grandchildren would covet one day, Miriam asked for the bag of stuffed cats. Nevertheless, my heart gladdened because of the geodes and cats. My granddaughter, the purger, had revealed the nascent soul of a collector, after all.