DISEASE ALERT

People who are moving from one home to the next live their lives in boxes. There are the boxes they begin saving in anticipation of the move. Then these boxes begin to hold the items as they are being packed. They have to remain somewhere during this time…let's see…on the floor? In a closet? A seldom used room? In the garage? All are bad choices. Renting storage space is costly.

Last year I saw commercials for something to help people who needed to put things someplace for a while but who didn't want to spend much money. The solution was called "PODS (like "peas in a pod") and I saw it on TV and then in person as one neighbor moved out and another moved in. The trailer-like vehicle with its big logo was parked in that driveway for several days while people were changing locations. I never actually witnessed the changeover of boxes, but I assumed there must have been one. I remember living in New Jersey and having a shortage of space for our stuff. A company called "Space Relief" was nearby and we rented a garage type of space for our things. This held the contents of our household quite well for a tidy sum. It proved invaluable after my mother died and as her only child, all her stuff became mine. We rented a bigger space and combined the two households' worth until it could be sorted through and garage saled. If ever there was a case of Boxitis, my mother's place had it. She was certainly boxic prior to her death. I'm surprised that no other residents of her apartment complex called the Department of Health or the CDC!

But back to our house at Tangled Oaks, the disease first appeared in the kitchen by the small freezer. One box at a time was set on top. Then smaller boxes were set on the floor beside it. Then more boxes on top of those boxes until we could barely sit at the kitchen table. Since these boxes contained my husband's stuff, having them moved was impossible since he knew "what everything in them was" and had to have it within his grasp at any given time. OK. But what about the spread of the disease into the dining room? It must have been growing faster than Michael Crichton's "Andromeda Strain©" to produce more boxes next to the table, under a second table, next to the window, and even on top of the dining table itself (where we hadn't had a meal since last Christmas). Alongside these boxes were small shiny objects that fascinated the Siamese cat that enjoyed batting them to the floor in the dark of the night, waking to be yelled at and threatened by my husband, but that is another story. Perhaps Sanchez was the first mammal to be affected with Boxitis?

When my groomer came to do Skittles and Patches I warned her about entering a "diseased home". She looked at me skeptically until I pointed out the growing pile of boxes right next to her chair and described the disease. I explained that it was not "toxic" but "boxic" and she smiled knowingly. Could her husband be spreading Boxitis to her area also? When I mentioned this to my husband that night, he pointed out that as I began my plan to move HIS dress shirts and pants to the unused guest room closet, I'd better be careful. Of what? All the boxes full of MY STUFF! I just laughed, saying that what was in that room was HIS. But the next day I opened the door to a closet packed tight with boxes, as I had anticipated. But as a tried to move them aside, I realized to my horror that they contained MY STUFF! How could this be? Wasn't all this stuff in the sewing room already? In THOSE BOXES? Now I was frantic. The disease had run rampant in our house and there was no stopping it. A garage sale had been rained out several summers ago and the cost and annoyance of having another was not worthwhile. FreeCycle helped me by having some clothes taken, but that was not anywhere near what needed to go. My daughter had volunteered to sell some of my husband's computer books on eBay, but that was just a drop in the bucket. Plus shortly after she took them, he needed some of them back!