Beech Tree News Network

We spent last week digging through Garey’s mom (Aggie’s) basement.  She was 94 when she passed last November, and parts of everything she bought or was given over her 94 years on this earth reside in that basement.

It mattered not to her that an item wasn’t in working order, it was never thrown away.  I counted 15 non-working phones, all individually wrapped in plastic bags.  The reason I am sure they are not in working order is because Aggie used everything until it was at death’s door.  There were also 14 non-working percolators—nearly one per non-working phone.  When we were eating lunch, I said to Garey, “Maybe she kept all those phones and percolators because they didn’t have trash pickup, and those items wouldn’t burn.”  Garey grinned.  “That’s not why she kept them,” he said.  “She kept them for spare parts.”  I can see that.  I could probably put enough of those parts together to create a working percolator.

Each time I go to Aggie’s house to dig through another area, I’m amazed at how much stuff you can actually store in a five-bedroom house with a basement.  Garey’s dad, J.D., built that house himself, and it is truly an architectural wonder.  Any other structure would have collapsed in on itself from the weight of the phones and percolators alone.

After each visit, I return home with new resolve.  I ask myself, what am I hoarding that’s going to make my kids crazy after I’m gone.  This time, it was greeting cards.  The thing about Aggie’s cards is you have to go through each one individually, because she left money in them.  Mostly, we found money in cards from her sisters, usually twenty-dollar bills.  We were also looking for one she told us about years before.  One Christmas, her mom and dad gave each of their eight children one hundred dollars apiece.  Aggie told us that she knew the struggle it had been for her parents to do that, and she had never been able to bring herself to spend it.  Garey’s sister, Charlotte, found the card, and there was the hundred-dollar bill, right where Aggie had left it.  This week, I’m going to find my boxes of cards and, except for those from Garey and the girls, they are going on top of a big bonfire.

I didn’t believe it possible, but the basement surpassed the upstairs bathroom for the number of bottles and cans we found.  They mostly contained bug-killing elixirs—some with ingredients banned many years ago.  Summertime in Alabama gives credence to the stockpile of bug-killers in that basement.  I honestly don’t know how the residents of the deep south endure the fire ants and swarms of black gnats that appear each summer.  I told Garey I couldn’t live there.  Garey told me that you have to be tough to do it, and that’s why Alabama’s football team is always one of the top contenders.  Those guys grew up fighting off swarms of gnats and fire ants.  Fighting off linemen is a cake walk in comparison.

On this last trip, we emptied nearly 80 quarts of green beans, some from the 90s.  The lids had rusted through, and the beans were ruined.  That’s another thing I told myself I will not do.  I’m not going to can hundreds of quarts of green beans every summer for fear that there will be none to can the next summer.  Yes, I know we could be visited by plagues of Biblical proportions or be bombed by China or descended upon by the seven horses of the Zombie Apocalypse, but I will not live under that fear.  If any of those three happens, and I run out of green beans, I will say, “Boy, was I wrong!”  In the meantime, however, I will be sharing my extra food.   

Getting Aggie’s house and contents ready for auction is a grueling process.  After each trip, we drag our weary bodies into Garey’s truck, and head home.  At some point on the way back, I turn to Garey and say, “We are not doing this to our children!”