Lifestyle
House Purging BY KARA KIEFER
Over the course of our married life, my husband and I have moved twice—once from Denver to Las Vegas and again from Las Vegas to Woodstock. Both were company moves, which meant we had the luxury of being packed and moved by a moving company. Moving companies are instructed, unless otherwise told, to pack EVERYTHING. This includes trash from trash cans, as we later Kara Kiefer is the editor found out when we unpacked in of Around Woodstock. Woodstock. She lives in Woodstock The advantage of having a with her husband Mike company pack you is obvious— and sons Brandon and much less work and stress for the Garrett. homeowner. The disadvantage is because you’re not packing yourself, the need to purge the house of unneeded belongings isn’t really a priority. Nineteen years later, we are acutely aware of this disadvantage. We’ve often joked that we need to rent a dumpster for the day to rid our house of everything we no longer need. Scary thing is, we’d probably fill it. Every now and then (not often enough), my husband and I will have a day where we don’t have anything going on, and the weather is miserable, so we will decide to tackle a room or two and purge. We grab a box of trash bags and go through closets and cabinets, deciding what to keep, donate or throw away.
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AROUND WOODSTOCK | November 2013
The latest purge involved the hall coat closet. Over the years, this closet has amassed large amounts of hoodies, coats, foul weather gear and blankets. We could barely keep the door closed. Typical of projects like this, I got distracted when I was trying to find a new space for the blankets we use while watching TV in the winter. The logical place to house them was in the armoire where the TV was housed. But when I opened the armoire, a whole new project stared me down—this was the place where all the kids’ VHS tapes had gone to die. I knew they were there, but over the years, I just couldn’t throw any of them away, even though it had been YEARS since any of them had been touched. What’s the rule? If it hasn’t been used or worn in six months, toss it? So I sat down and began the process of sorting through these tapes, and with the sorting came a flood of memories. There was the “Barney” tape that we made my oldest son when he was two. It contained episode after episode of “Barney,” and I can remember him like it was yesterday, sitting on the couch with his blankey, watching it over and over. Then I found “Here Comes the Truck” and “Here Comes the Firetruck.” Both my boys watched those videos incessantly. And of course, we had almost every Disney movie released on video from 1993 to 2000, including “The Lion King,” “Pinocchio, “Aladdin” and lots more. Every movie had a memory attached, and I remembered the age of each child when the movie came out and which one was a favorite of whom. It was hard to put these tapes into a garbage bag, but I also realized that the memories associated with this period in time weren’t going to disappear just because the tapes did. And in the end, I donated all the videos to charity. Except “Barney.”