I have been pulling up some old carpeting in a bedroom, and it’s the slowest and most painful task I have ever undertaken. It wouldn’t be such a tough process if the flooring had received more attention in the past, but sometimes a situation makes it impossible to do, and this was the case here. My parents laid the carpet themselves from a large remnant, a long time ago. The carpet itself is a no-pile teal colorway with rubber backing.
Well, at least in the beginning it had rubber backing. Time disintegrated it into a combination of brittle mats and dust, all of which I will need to pick up. Some of it is stuck to the hardwood floor and needs scraping. This means that the old lady needs to go on hands and knees and deal with the flooring, foot by foot. Along with a sturdy pair of carpet shears, my dustpan and brush, a trash bag and sheer force of will, I have made progress, but age and the summer heat are battling me.
Also, my parents’ and my old clothes found their way into this room over the years, and now I need to work my way around piles of things which should have been discarded ten diets ago.
My social media feed is filled with self-help posts posing questions such as “how are clutter and trauma related?” I can tell you; when your family dynamic changes, such as when somebody passes or moves away, all of the things don’t always follow them. Some of the old clothes will fit me now, but I’ve moved on to other garments. This will mean bagging them up and arranging for pick-up to free the space I need to continue handling the carpet. The next phase will involve moving the entire bed to get the carpeting underneath. More scraping and cleaning.
In the process of bagging the old clothes, the memories of their time decorating my body will come to mind. The years I wore gowns like prairie folk, and those I wore pajamas looking like Katherine Hepburn. The move from polyester to denim, nylon to cotton, bright to muted colors, and size large to. . . .well, you get the picture. And so the trauma continues.
Decluttering and changing a living space can be a cleansing ritual, but modern décor gurus seem to want us to aim for a minimalist surrounding, with little on the flat surfaces and walls devoid of much identity. I already broke some unwritten rule by buying a tufted headboard for the new queen bed in the room. I like the look and, if I were to be graded, would gladly take the zero. It is neutral in color and offers something soft to sit up in bed upon. What more could one want in a bedroom?
So my plan for the next phase of cleaning is to place old summer clothes in one bag, and old winter clothes in the other, and make a phone call for a charity to pick up the bags and remove them forever. Somebody should enjoy the items, as the clothes succumbed to outsizing or boredom after years of use, rather than actual wear and tear.
Which brings to mind another kind of trauma; being told in social media that most donated clothes wind up in a landfill. That’s a guilt trip nobody wants to burden themselves with. I do, however, also have a back-up plan involving a set of bags in which I can donate clothes which are guaranteed to be repurposed instead of going to a cloth mountain in some forsaken back corner of the world, and in return I will earn points for shopping online.
I promise to not shop for more clothes with those points. I have enough to wear for now, and it’s time to say goodbye to the past.
After I scrape one more foot of that carpet backing away.
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