junk

#37

6 July 2025

Dear Jana,

Getting featured on the show American Pickers would probably be a dream come true for Brett. He loved your hometown story about the junk collector and has always wished for a junkyard of his own. You might concede he’s well on his way to achieving it, but no surprise here—I noted foreshadowings when we met. I try to keep a semblance of order where possible.

No matter how new the house, it will run down, wear out, and fall apart. Complaints about newer construction don’t escape me. Our being tinkerers either way, we went the historic route. I also like cast iron pots and stoves and bathtubs, if you hadn’t noticed. I’ve accepted the laws of gravity and thermodynamics. Things buckle and rust and decay. Plastic warps and fades. Paint chips and flakes. Wood splinters and sags. I’ve read “Ozymandias” and clambered over an ancient ruin or two. Glass or metal, brick or stone, all will crumble and erode. A 135-year-old house has withstood a certain amount of history, if it is still standing at all, and I’m drawn to the quirks of earlier centuries. Of eras when folks did just fine without electricity, television, or StarLink. I like the reminder of cruder, starker times. Occasionally I wonder if I were to elect a slower pace, and miss out on exotic citrus and jet airplanes, what might I gain instead? But the lines have fallen to me in pleasant places. I won’t scorn air conditioning and asthma inhalers.

One quirk of the 19th century around here was a dearth of closets. This was due to the scarcity of extravagant wardrobes, meaning something besides your work clothes and your Sunday best. The Anchorage has a single closet under the stairs in the picture window room, where we store linens in a cedar chest. Our clothes are kept upstairs on shelves or hung on hooks and racks in our respective bedrooms. Winterwear and flannel go into the attic crawlspace in tubs and suitcases. Storage strategery is a favorite pastime of mine. I tuck brooms behind the pantry and stow all manner of tools and tape measures into various crannies about the house. A tackle box full of hardware or board game pieces can occupy me for hours.

Our basement is a sort of catch-all storage. Extra furniture, canning jars, egg crates, spare light bulbs. Games that won’t fit on our bookshelf upstairs. Box fans or space heaters depending on the season. Inherited memorabilia that was presumably appreciated by someone somewhere. The layout is a large rectangle with cinderblock walls and a concrete floor. The round lid of a sump pump is sunk into the floor in the middle, and a hose snakes up and along the rafters to siphon moisture towards the downhill side of the property. Amid the freezer and utilities at one end, knotty wooden posts prop up the floorboards above. A steel beam spans the opposite end, which has become a studio with a game table and a workbench. My sister suggested the French label atelier. We’ve replaced the old windows, and repainted and resealed the walls and floor, but the plumbing sector of the basement is yet to be renovated.

*

Winterburn took out the arborvitae. The emerald ash borer is killing our ash trees. Our elderly maples are systematically toppling. Saplings shoot up to take their place. I don’t feel terribly sad. All trees die eventually. Oak will outlive pine, but both succumb to the ravages of time. Was it Bill Bryson who wrote about the chestnut forests going extinct, giving way to new species? The world wasn’t meant to last forever. At least, not until the curse’s reverse is complete. Deeper magic from before the dawn of time has begun working backwards even now. Salvagers walk among the wreckage, and some of us love a good junk drawer.