Commentary
Reducing clutter doesn’t mean leaving mannequin, winter coats
Guest commentary
Moving. Say the word, and exhaus
tion settles upon me like a cold. There’s
only one color I dislike in this world:
the color of cardboard. I’ve moved
enough times to memorize its anes
thetizing hue. So I’ve left my new apart
ment in San Francisco to escape the
sea of boxes, the smell of tape, the pop
ping of bubble wrap. I believe it’s possi
ble to wash away the travails of reloca
tion with the joys of retail therapy.
After learning I’d be moving to
San Francisco (and closer to the lo
cales I cover in my travel writing),
I experienced a gamut of emotions,
all of which fell into the family of
excitement. But the reality of a
cross-country move hit especially
hard when the moving estimates ar
rived on my doorstep.
“It’s all determined by weight,”
said the representative.
“So what, are you saying I need
to put my apartment on a crash
diet?” I responded.
I called it Operation Downsize —
a necessary evil, as it were, because
I was halving my square footage and
decreasing my number of closets by
three. One week into the packing
process, and the people at Salvation
Army knew me by name. I confront
ed my winter coat addiction, follow
ing an intervention performed by a
few close friends who’d come to help
me deal with my armoire.
“Well, at least I’ll be able to use
them now,” I defended myself. “It’s
cold in San Francisco.”
“True, true,” said my pal. “But
they’re as heavy as humans, and al
most as big.”
“You’d be surprised how much this
armoire holds,” I replied.
I filled 14 boxes with its contents.
I pared down my mug collection
— one that grew as a result of my
travels with the magazine, as I
bought a different one on each of my
trips. “You could serve coffee to a
small country,” said my mother,
who’s now storing at least 40 of them
in her spare bedroom.
I gave away four boxes of beauty
products that were spilling from my
linen closet. For a person who wears
little, if any, makeup, I owned a su
perfluous amount of it. But that’s
what happens when one of your best
friends becomes the beauty editor of
a national women’s magazine.
(Think care packages.)
“I couldn’t just throw it all away,” I
said, explaining the cargo to my
friends, who swarmed like buzzards
around the Bobbi Brown and Trish
McEvoy goods.
I sold my sofa and kitchen table,
gave away 30 cookbooks, and watched
half of my material possessions disap
pear in the arms of my loving parents,
whose nest is so far from empty it ap
pears I still reside there.
When the movers came, I bragged
to the driver, Bill, that I’d relin
quished the tremendous weight of
clutter — and said goodbye to every
thing I could live without.
“What about this? You can’t live
without this?” he asked, carrying my
mannequin to the truck.
“That’s Dorothy,” I said. “She’s my
roommate. She may not be good for
rent, but she’ll keep you company as
you drive across the country.”
Bill and Dorothy arrived in the Bay
Area last weekend, and it took them
almost as long to find a place to park
Bill’s 18-wheeler as it did for them to
traverse the United States. The pair
— and a host of hired movers — as
cended the stairs of my apartment
and scoped out the situation.
“Hmm,” said Bill, rubbing his chin
and shaking his head, a gesture that
foreshadowed future problems.
They got the bed in, and the dress
er, and my desk. But when I heard a
loud string of curse words coming
from the street below me, I prepared
myself for the worst.
The armoire. It was stuck in the
front door frame.
This is the closest these men will
ever come to delivering a baby,
I thought.
They shoved, pushed, and grunt
ed. I closed my eyes and prayed for a
smooth delivery. It wasn’t to be.
They finally gave up on the armoire
and left it on the street.
“But that was going to be my
coat closet,” I told Bill. “What will
I do now?”
“I hope Dorothy likes to dress in
layers,” he said.
I sat in my apartment, looking out
the window at the armoire, which
stood like a wounded soldier on the
sidewalk. I debated my options, and
saw that I had only one: to go in
search of strong men.
I rounded the corner and found
two movers who may not have been
looking for trouble, but got a dose of
it in me. Teary-eyed and fatigued, I
begged them, in the thickest South
ern drawl I could muster, to help.
They worked for more than an
hour, but unfortunately discovered
my armoire to be less limber than a
deep freeze. Frankie, the talkative
one, refused payment and suggested
I call his carpenter friend, Johnny.
“He could do a little surgical number
on this piece and rebuild it in your
apartment,” he said.
I was all but ready to give the ar
moire to Frankie and call it a day
when I got a second wind of hope
and dialed Johnny’s number.
TVenty minutes later, he was giv
ing my armoire the once-over, creat
ing a master plan.
“Yeah, this is doable. We’ll just
take it piece by piece, you and me,”
he said.
It was painful to behold, really. The
tearing apart of boards, the splitting of
wood, the chipping of paint. My ar
moire was badly bruised by the time
we hauled her up, in sections, to my
apartment. But five hours later, Johnny
had her put together again, standing
with perfect posture in my living room.
“We’ve got to do something about
those scratches on the side,” he said.
“What about Dorothy? We could put
an eye hook in her so she’d stay close
to the armoire.”
“You mean drill a hole in her neck?”
I said. “I don’t want to hurt her.”
“Lady, she’s a mannequin,” he said.
“There isn’t going to be any blood.”
There wasn’t any blood, but
Dorothy now has a small, shall we
say, hole in her throat that’s in need
of camouflage. And that’s exactly
why I’ve decided to hit the great
shops of Union Street.
“Why on earth would you be shop
ping for clothes when you just gave
half of them away?” my mother asked
me when we spoke moments ago.
“This has nothing to do with me,”
I replied. “I’m shopping for Dorothy.
She needs a new scarf.”
© 2003, Coastal Living. Paige Porter
is a features writer for Coastal Living
magazine. E-mail her
at paige_porter@timeinc.com.
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