Of course, everything was still wet and smelling like a big sewer. In the weak light of the jury-rigged lamps, we found a scene of utter and complete chaos and destruction. Pieces of wood mingled with soggy paper, plastic boxes filled up to the brim with water that had been carried several feet away from their former place and deposited on top of overturned furniture. The car wheels with tires on we keep down there must have acted like a mixer in the enclosed space when the air in the tires set them afloat.
What used to be a wise precaution, namely, putting everything into waterproof plastic boxes, has come back to haunt us with a vengeance because these boxes, once filled up to the brim, won't empty on their own, which means having to drain them manually of the stinking liquid. As some of the boxes contained things that were salvageable, such as several complete sets of china (I mentioned these before), ditching them wholesale was out of the question.
Anything wood, cloth, paper and electronics, such as our battery loader, and the pieces of Ikea shelving I had kept down there were, of course, only fit for tossing. So toss them we did. The surprising thing, for me, was that many things that would, theoretically, have been cleanable turned out to be, to us, not worth the hassle. Pots, pans, the remains of my cheap glassware. Flower pots. Most of the plastic boxes.
What I kept, at least for now, is my bicycles, the car wheels, both of which need to be inspected for damages, the best of the china sets, about half of the flower pots, our balcony boxes which we hadn't planted and hung yet, and about half a dozen especially sturdy plastic boxes.
The rest of the stuff is mostly gone. I still have about five waterlogged boxes down there which I did not get around to emptying before the generator ran out of gasoline, so I'll have to return down there tonight.
Of course, everyone on our street was decluttering their soaked stuff from the cellars. What was incredible was that some of the stuff obviously was picked up by someone else less squeamish than we were. Well, good luck with that.
Decluttering our cellar was something we had planned to do for quite a while, except that the attempts we made were regularly cut short by the sheer amount of things to be moved. Having a bad case of might need that someday syndrome didn't exactly help, either. So the stuff stayed and multiplied.
Being forced to get rid of most of it is an incredible feeling. Everything in that cellar that was clutter is gone, just like that. It was not even hard. Tossing a piece of junk that drips with brownish, stinky liquid, or is caked with a layer of sediment, is easier than deciding to keep and clean it.
That sounds good as long as I do not remind myself that I might have saved myself hours of slaving away in that sewage hole if I had only kept those things that are, today, valuable enough to me to go to the pain of cleaning them.
Just because I have a space to put something in does not mean I have to keep it.
Going through that kind of experience drives that home pretty hard.I don't think I'll ever fill that cellar up again.
Tonight, if the generator is running again, I'll do the rest of the boxes. And then there's nothing left but to wait for electricity and heating to be turned back on so I'll have hot water to clean what I want to keep.
Julia
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