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COULD WE HAVE A DRUM roll, please...I put every last ornament on the tree and had a fine time doing it! I even piled up all the plastic bins used to store the various decorations and put them...uh...on their way back to the attic from whence they came.

It's tempting to bask just a tiny bit. Yes, it is.

However, as I'm so prone to do... in accomplishing one task, I flounder around (very easy to do in my attic) and stumble upon (literally, in this case) a mother lode of unpleasant work. It was that pesky construction of empty cardboard boxes in the attic stairwell, and similar edifices residing amid the old baby buggy, boxes of dishes, bags of old stuffed animals, boxes of books, old record player (is there any other kind?), and endless boxes filled with the gleanings from You-must-clean-up-your-room-now! adolescent bedroom floors. (Yes, I must confess, I had at least one child whose response was to simply cull items needed for daily living and consign everything else to a box destined for the far reaches of the attic. Everything else. Gum wrappers. Old homework papers. Pencil stubs. Leaky pens. Paperback books. Rolls of tape, gluesticks, scraps of material...I had crafty children). Okay, you get the idea.

Suffice it to say, I had (oh, lovely past tense) an attic landscape littered with both empty and full boxes.

Seeing as how it is easier to deal with an empty box than a full one, and having a sudden epiphany that I am never going to bemoan the fact that--alas--I let go of the perfect empty box just before I could call it into play,

I set out on a rampage to rid the upper regions of all such riffraff. Which was all well and good, and took a surprisingly brief amount of time. I piled boxes within boxes and, though the multiple trips down the stairs were a bit precarious, managed to transport all stacks down two flights to the kitchen.


Where my moment of euphoria lasted just long enough for me to ask myself exactly how--in an ecologically friendly way, of course--I'm going to quickly dispense with these stacks. I know, I know...it's not simple, and it's not quick. I'm dragging my feet already at the thought of tearing them all down to flatness and taking to the recycling center...0pen only on first and third Saturdays of the month until noon (often remembered...arrgh...with a jolt at 12:10 p.m.)

So there you have it...for the time being, my basking must give way to busting up.

On the bright side, my attic seems more spacious. Next year perhaps it won't be a where's-waldo operation finding those Christmas decorations!


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