Do your in-laws keep everything? Mine did and disposing of it has been, um, fun
It’s a lot tougher to throw things out than to just keep them.
So it is particularly painful when you have to go through and throw out the things kept by people who kept everything as my in-laws did.
Maybe not so much painful as discomforting perhaps. They grew up when people didn’t have a lot of stuff so everything was used again and again and then used for other things. Admirable but you can only use so many towels so thin you could see through them.
Plus, whenever we tried to organize, clean or pitch my late mother-in-law’s rallying cry was “Leave that alone, I’ll get to it.”
Even when she could get to it she didn’t, so last weekend I found myself pulling foodstuffs out of cabinets and examining expiration dates. Some things were easy, like the graham cracker pie crust that crumbled when it was picked up. And most things had dates — many 10 years old or so.
After a couple of hours I had two large trash bags full of old food mixes of various kinds. I took it out to the woods to dump it and spent more time tearing open packages and envelopes. We figured maybe it would be all right for the groundhogs.
But the yellow Labrador retriever, Hank, followed me and had a feast. He kept walking under the shower of various things I was dumping so his head was coated in Shake n’ Bake and Hamburger Helper. He loved it.
I had to throw away years of cake mixes that had languished on top of the refrigerator for too many years. Chocolate, yellow, angel’s food, caramel ... even carrot cake mixes died. I didn’t feel bad about the carrot, though, because no one should put vegetables in cake. Open bags of pasta, packets of gravy mix and some things I couldn’t identify all went to the woods.
I really felt kind of bad because I had to dump so much food. What are the Golden Dipt people going to do now that my mother-in-law no longer is continually stocking up on various coatings? I hope they survive.
Judging from the huge number of boxes of expired Jello I pitched, that company must be feeling hurt as well. And I feel bad for all that hamburger which never got any helper.
I couldn’t help but feel bad because all this stuff was ruined and there are starving people everywhere. Now I’ll have to donate to food banks to assuage my guilt.
More work left for me
When I went back to screen the canned goods closet, I thought there would be more stuff that could be donated. Well, it was a little better because canned food usually has a longer life. But not that long. The two cans of 10-year-old white hominy weren’t going anywhere. Neither were the outdated pork and beans and the bag of sorghum flour (courtesy of Pioneer Seed Co.)
The closet had the answer to the question of what happened to flyswatters she accused us of misplacing. Heavens knows what I will find when I go into the deep dark recesses of the cabinets under the sink. And there are two deep freezes yet to be dealt with.
Stay tuned.