By Lorry Myers
Since my husband’s unexpected death, I have slowly been making changes and sorting through my life. I started with the kitchen cabinets and all those condiments that apparently have expiration dates. Out went the hot sauce, the bottle of A1, and some kind of burn your face off BBQ sauce.
All of them expired.
It is time for me to take inventory of my life, my home and all that fills it up. I need to sort things out, find their worth, and their place in my new world.
Last year, spring cleaning shamed me into cleaning out my husband’s clothes closet.
I sorted wisely and found a talented person who made pillows and bears out of the plaid shirts and fleece jackets that Randy wore best. I was surprised that sorting through Randy’s clothes was not as emotional as I worried it to be. After all, it’s just shoes and shirts and hanging suits.
I’m hanging on to the memories.
Now, another year of spring cleanup is here, and I am feeling the pressure. I decided it was probably time to open the door to my husband’s tool shed and see what exactly is there. I rarely have a need to go into Randy’s workspace because I have my own little pink toolbox that Randy put together for me so I wouldn’t go in there and mess with his stuff.
It’s time I messed with his stuff.
When I turned on the tool room light and really looked, I wondered what it was all about. As I opened doors and drawers in the multiple rolling toolboxes, there appeared to be multiple items of the same thing, each one in its only individual space. The longer I looked, the longer I wondered.
What is going on?
Why did we need eight toolboxes, seven cans of paint, six pails of nails, five spools of wire, four weed sprayers, three coils of rope, two sledgehammers, and a pegboard that had never been hung?
That’s not all.
When I started digging around, I found more hammers, screwdrivers, and pliers than I wanted to count. I’ve been learning a lot lately; way more than I want to. Still, someone needs to explain how this tool thing works. Why does one person need all those hammers?
For the complete column, see this week’s edition of the Centralia Fireside Guard.
