All of the clothes are now out of boxes. I’ve reshuffled the garage configuration. I’ve been in the attic — which is a chore to be avoided in August, I’ve decided.
But it is so new. I’ve never had an attic with storage space, you see. My grandmother has one and I always loved the sound that door makes, all springy and rusty and just full of inviting tetanus, I’m sure. It is odd, my grandmother runs the home where so many of my memories take place. She is an incredibly warm lady, an excellent hostess and champion of baked goods, yet the sounds are what I think about the most. The mysterious creaking descent of the attic door, the wood-on-wood clatter of the decorative welcome sign on her front door, the whump and thud of the oven, these are the things that spring to mind.
Anyway. She has terrific attic space, and as a child it was the rarest treats to climb up there. There’s a lot of Christmas stuff hidden in the heat and rafters of her home, but who knows what else. Now I have my own. (But I don’t remember ever being as impressed by the heat in her attic as what I’m experiencing in mine.) I’m storing our Christmas stuff there and the components of the future projects I’m hoping to conquer. They’re next to the extra luggage and cardboard — oh the humanity of the cardboard.
And you can’t stay up there long. Because it is incredibly warm. But, I’ve laid out a system for the attic, and it is important you set such precedent when beginning in a new home. Things can’t be merely slung haphazardly about. You must gain control of that situation, and early. So we now have in place a line of march in the attic from items of greatest need, and thus easiest access, to things like the wardrobe boxes. They are incredibly useful and wonderful pieces of cardboard engineering, but we hope to store them for some time.
With order in place above us in the sauna-attic, life can continue peacefully for us in the climate controlled portion of the house.
We visited Lowe’s today, picked up new washing machine connectors — the six-foot ones cost a buck more than the five-foot model — and returned a few extra paint items. I re-connected the washing machine. We unpacked. I re-organized the garage again. I realized I’ll have plenty more reasons to back into the attic.
I realized we have a lot of boxes.
