Inventory

Lately we seem to be in a streamline, down-size, tidying up mode, and I decided to clean out the hallway closet. In particular, I wanted to make room for an ice cream maker I had just ordered from e-Bay, which turned out to be the third one I owned, but it was time for some general culling and organization anyway.

I’d gone all in when I launched my foray into bread-baking a couple of years ago, and in the far corner of the top shelf, I found the remnants. There was a bread proofing basket, a cast iron double dutch oven, and a tall plastic bucket with measuring lines on it, whose purpose I have long forgotten. There was also a scale for weighing ingredients––I had read that precision was the earmark of good baking, and that weight, more than volume, was supposedly the key. I should have realized then that I was not going to become an artisan baker. My style is improvisational, not meticulous.

Now my baking fling had deteriorated into closet clutter, a mute testimony to my failure, and it had to go.

I called Carey to see if she wanted any of the bread-baking supplies, and also to offer her one of the three ice cream making machines.

She expressed a flicker of interest in the food scale, but then confessed she already owned two.

I looked at the scale with renewed curiosity: brand new, never used. I knew there were folks who got healthy and slender by monitoring their diets and weighing every morsel. I’m always open to self-improvement.

“Monte,” I said, “We’re not the sort of people who are going to measure our food portions, are we?”

“No,” he replied. “Emphatically not.”

It did seem unlikely. I placed it in the giveaway box.

I dusted off a mixer and a 1970s crock-pot, both of which still seem useful. Next to these, incongruously, was an iron. I tried to remember the last time I had ironed anything.

“Monte,” I asked, “Do you think we’ll ever again have occasion to iron something?”

“No,” he said, without hesitation.

It’s true I cannot recall ironing anything in recent memory, but I also cannot recall a time in my life when I didn’t at least own an iron. An iron seems like a basic piece of equipment for housekeeping and grooming. It’s a weighty and fundamental thing…an object that implies purpose and potential. Getting rid of the iron seemed too drastic.

“How about if I just relocate it?” I asked. “Downstairs, in the cupboard near the washing machine, out of the way. It’s sort of related to laundry, right?”

I impulsively called Carey again to see if her busy young family owned an iron. She wasn’t sure.

“Well, from now on,” I told her, “you can share ours. It’s in the lower room. It can be the neighborhood iron.”

This was going well. The sharing and transfer of goods was oddly satisfying. I was feeling efficient, generous, tidy.

I proceeded to organize canisters of tea and crackers, boxes of cereal, and containers of nuts. I shifted around paper towels and cleaning supplies.

And we now have a Covid corner–doesn’t everyone?–with KN95 masks, test kits, anti-bacterial wipes, and protective gloves, all in one convenient location.

We have matches and toothpicks, too. And emergency candles. These are surely a form of wealth.

It was a productively domestic morning. Our commodities are all inventoried and in place, and the shelves are wiped clean. We’re thoroughly stocked and sorted and stoked.

Meanwhile, the wind outside was howling, but we decided to walk to Carey and Ryan’s house and hand-deliver the ice cream maker and a bottle of cream. It would be fun for the girls to make ice cream. The sun was glaringly bright, and the air was dry, and the trees in the canyon looked thirsty and sad.

We sat on the deck and talked with our young friends. They are still in the thick of things, working hard and raising children. They were tired and rumpled and their house was a mess, with clothes and toys spilling out of open closets, but it was a happy sort of chaos. We remembered how it used to be in those long-ago, exhausting days that seem peculiarly endless until suddenly they’re gone.

We decided we’re going to have an ice cream social soon, and when I got home, I took a nap on the sofa.