A pack rat's promise: It's in a box, somewhere

January always seems like such a good month to take inventory of one's material belongings, pare down the superfluous stuff.

Out with the old, in with the new.

Why then, after all these Januaries, is my basement still bulging with boxes of things that are worth seemingly nothing until I sit down to analyze the contents? At that point I can't bear to part with a thing.

I've decided to blame my mother for my pack-rat syndrome. She openly admits her weakness for hoarding stuff, and I fear I've inherited the affliction. There's a difference between saving meaningful memorabilia - my grade-school art projects, for example - and saving stuff just because.

It wasn't long after my siblings and I left home decades ago that Mom took the opportunity to turn our rooms into warehouses. There's a method to her madness. The North Room (my middle brother's old room) contains scraps of fabric, organized in rows, by color and type of material. She navigates the maze of boxes with the precision of a brain surgeon and can put her hands on a specific color of corduroy faster than you can say junk. The East Room contains old books and my youngest brother's collection of old skateboards. My parents' farmhouse has six bedrooms … you get the picture.

The last time I was home, my old closet was full to the ceiling. On top of the pile was a red felt-top hat I got in college for some cheesy musical production, and a miniature steam engine my oldest brother built 40 years ago for a science project.

Under my bed are stashes of Life magazine dating back to the early 1970s and vintage copies of farm publications such as Hoard's Dairyman and Successful Farmer. "I'll get to them some day…" is her mantra. There might be valuable things to clip and save.

There are things she's saved that I wish had been disposed of, like the report card for my junior year of high school. I always told my own kids I didn't get any C grades in high school, and I truly believed that. A couple of years ago, when Mom brought out a box of old school papers (to show off her new filing system) I was horrified to find I'd gotten a C+ in algebra one quarter. There it was, incriminating evidence that I, too, had struggled in math. Somehow I had mentally suppressed that tidbit of info all those years.

I had to confess to my kids, who of course have chided me ever since.

Then there are the things that get thrown and should have been saved, no matter what the condition. Do not, I repeat, do not ever throw the teddy bear music box your youngest daughter got as a gift when she was born, even if it's stopped working and has long been discarded as a toy-box castoff. If you do, she'll never, ever forgive you.

I speak from experience here. It was an honest mistake. I must have tossed it when we moved from a rental house into a new home about 10 years ago. For years, I kept chanting the pack-rat mantra: "It's in a box, somewhere…" But I finally had to concede. The teddy bear music box was gone forever.

Here's another good bit of advice. Don't ever let your kids sell their old toys at a yard sale so they can earn the money they need for $80 sneakers. They may think they want to part with that Disney character train set, but in the end, they'll blame you for letting them sell it. I know what I'm talking about here.

The fear of disposing of a childhood treasure is as good a reason as any to continue my pack-rat ways. I've got bins of Barbies, boxes of books, piles of plastic ponies that I'll continue to house until my kids have stash piles of their own.

There's another curious aspect to this so-called syndrome. While I can't bear to part with my own things, including boxes upon boxes of old newspapers I've written for over the past quarter-century, I don't seem to have any trouble throwing out my husband's old things. God only knows what I threw out when we moved to Whitefish 14 years ago. He hasn't missed any of it, and if he does, here's my comeback: "It's in a box, somewhere…"

Features editor Lynnette Hintze may be reached at 758-4421 or by e-mail at lhintze@dailyinterlake.com