By Sean Sullivan Lagniappe columnist

There’s nothing like packing everything you own into an army of cardboard boxes to let you know you have too much stuff. The rolling stone gathers no moss, but when that stone stays in one place too long, then moss flat covers it up! I’ve been gathering moss a long time and then I married another moss-covered stone and combined our moss.

Nomadic people have it easy. You may question that and argue that they spend their whole lives on the move and live hand-to-mouth and probably have a short, brutal existence. OK, but other than that, they’ve got it made.

Having to carry everything on your back or tired old donkey or camel will keep you from holding onto 40 pounds of banks statements from 1990-1995. A nomad would be unable to have a collection of National Geographic magazines that takes up 300 square feet.

I’ve been trying to figure out the logic in keeping old magazines. I can barely remember what I read last week, let alone what year or issue the discussion of the environmental factors affecting the Peruvian Altiplana was in. So back to our nomad, let’s just make him a Bedouin for grins, he would probably find it silly that the Mrs. has accumulated a shoe collection that would shod the entire Chinese army.

Hold on…I’m just busy picturing the People’s Liberation Army in some cute pumps and swanky sling backs. The Bedouin would probably question my keeping hundreds of photo negatives from pictures long since thrown away, forgotten or held as evidence. Nomadic people might question the keeping of every plastic cup from every banquet, college football game or delicious ICEE enjoyed over the last 10 years. Our nomad might question the sense in having a T-shirt collection that consists of shirts so tight they would act as a sausage casing on a body that has grown wider as the decade has passed. By now our Bedouin tribesman has looked at me with disgust and continued off across the Sahara to his next oasis or dagger duel.

The monumental task of moving a household full of the booty of two lifetimes leads one to start questioning what things are really important. The cliché “if you haven’t used it in a year, throw it away” well, that is just stupid. I have pictures of my grandparents and old Boy Scout uniforms that I don’t regularly visit, but there is not a chance that I’m going to throw those items out.

I set some rules for myself to triage the daunting piles of stuff to be moved. First, pants more than four inches smaller than my current waist are basically just a memory of days gone by and actually have no chance of ever returning to active service, so I ditched all 43 pair of them. Next came the novelty shirts, these are shirts that seemed really cool when I bought them, but a buttoned-down, short-sleeve embossed with a checkerboard of leaping Marlin is only super-sharp for so long.

Next came the hat collection. The collection basically consists of baseball style caps with a cowboy hat, Irish Tam and lime green bucket hat thrown in just in case I need to look stupid at a moment’s notice. The stupid hats take up very little space in comparison to the burgeoning coffers of my cap collection. It seems that every event that happens these days has to be documented by a baseball cap, and I seem to have at least one of each of these.

The easiest to cull through were the tiny beanie-sized ones advertising some product or event that has long since faded from memory. The hardest were my John Deere hats. My John Deere hat collection had to be culled through not because of the space they would take up in our new house, but because Ashton Kutcher and the nation’s wannabees decided they would make a fashion statement and ruin something I hold deere, uh, I mean “dear.” My grandfather and ancestors were all farmers and I started wearing John Deere hats as a little boy to be more like Grandpa.

Believe me, my grandfather could have worn a stuffed Emu on his head and I would have had to sort through a collection of Emu hats last week. I wore the green hats for many years to honor Grandpa and the green tractors he ran for so many years, and I collected a lot of them, but now they just sit idle in the closet all because of a punk kid who gets his action from older chicks.

The next items on the chopping block were VCR tapes. The hours I spent watching old unlabeled VHS tapes trying to figure out why I thought particular television shows or movies were worth taping gave me time to dwell on the bad entertainment taste of my youth. The final area I did some serious pre-move culling in was the junk drawer.

I think almost every home in America has one of these, most of the time the junk drawer is in the kitchen and is home to every item that can’t fit in elsewhere. Junk drawers may begin as a home for Scotch tape, batteries and pet medicines, but soon become home to so much more. In our junk drawer I had a huge collection of soy and duck sauce from our local Chinese food restaurant. What I had planned for a gallon and a half of individually packaged Asian seasonings I don’t know, but they had a home in the junk drawer.

Clothespins, paper clips and rubber bands also had a strong showing in the junk drawer and I had a really hard time of throwing them away for some reason. Refrigerator magnets and pieces of paper with phone numbers scribbled on them held a pretty sizable duchy in junk drawer land as well. The almost primal need for a junk drawer has proven itself to me though. While I threw away a lot of junk and abandoned the old house’s junk drawer, its spirit followed me to the new house and another junk drawer has started just a week into our life in the new house.

The cleansing nature of having to move has helped pare back our possessions to not quite a nomad level, but at least a little moss was shaken free. The problem, though, is it just leaves more space to re-accumulate new crap.

Sean Sullivan has a gallon of soy sauce available to the highest bidder.

Sean Sullivan is Lagniappe lagniappe columnist. Contact him at ssullivan@lagniappemobile.com.

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