Cleaning the Garage

I'm from a family of five closely spaced siblings, product of parents who married "late in life" (Dad was 29 and Mom 30) and felt the need to move fast to have the six children they had planned. By the time #4 (Glenn) was a year old in 1966, they decided that four was a very good number. Anne (#5...she turns 40 tomorrow) begged to differ, and put in her appearance shortly before #1's 9th birthday. The result was five children becoming teenagers just as Mom hit menopause. To give Mom some needed relief, Dad devised cruel torture called "Cleaning the Garage."

The garage was a two-car space with a single door that weighed as much as the old Chevy wagon that never ever saw the inside of the garage. Stored in this edifice were sleds, bikes, wooden go-carts, Glenn's Big Wheel (he rode it until he was 17), Anne's Inch Worm (we just threw it out in May), a straw archery target from the junior high school where Dad was the PE coach, bats, baseballs, softballs, tennis balls, tennis raquets, basketballs, card table chairs, trash cans, an aluminum row boat (eventually tied up to the rafters as a safe place for the cat to have kittens), the riding lawn mower from Uncle Jim that on its best day achieved a speed of 2 mph and every left-over building supply from every odd job Dad picked up after school and in the summer.

It was crowded. It was disorganized. There was cat poop and cat pee in very unexpected places. And Mom dreamed....dreamed....of getting a car in there. As if!

So, on Garage Cleaning Day, we all grudgingly slunk out to the garage and cleaned it. Dad officiated. Anne usually got out of it and rode her Inch Worm up and down the sidewalk or sold leaves door to door around the neighborhood with Chrissy from next door.

The operation was quite simple.

First, we took everything that wasn't nailed down out of the garage and put it in the driveway.

Then we swept the garage (everyone wanted to be the sweeper).

Then we put it all back in again...neatly.

Voila! Clean Garage!

I have a two-car garage now. Until we recently sold my Mom's house and had to empty it pretty quickly, I could get two cars in it. I also don't have orange wallpaper in my bedroom, but that's another story.