For most of last month, the Woodward household ran on adrenaline.
The reason ostensibly was a visit from out-of-state friends we seldom see; we wanted the house and yard to look extra nice. But it became more than a mere cleaning, even a spring cleaning. It became a purge. Think Bob Villa and Martha Stewart on steroids.
My wife and I have been in our house 27 years now, raised three kids and helped raise two grandkids there. You collect a lot of stuff with that much living, and the place where it happens gets its share of scuffs, scars and scratches. Occasional overhauls are needed. And every so often you have to bite the bullet and do things you’ve been putting off for too long.
Topping our to-do list was the garage. It wasn’t as if it never gets cleaned; garage cleanings are semi-regular occurrences at our house. But over time things accumulate. Things you either can’t bring yourself to throw away or that are impossible to throw away.
The former included boxes of children’s books, baby shoes, skis, special-edition newspapers and magazines, career mementos and other flotsam, all of which we had in abundance. The latter covered the spectrum from hazardous-waste materials to … you’ve heard the expression “everything but the kitchen sink?” We had one of those, courtesy of a remodeling. Cast iron, gut-wrenchingly heavy. At risk of rupturing something, I loaded it into the trunk. A recycling center gave me three bucks for it.
A grinding day of work liberated a corner unseen in 20 years. That our visitors were unlikely to see it was irrelevant. The garage was functional again.
The downstairs office was another story. These days it doubles as a nursery for our grandson, meaning that unused office trappings were competing for too little space with too many toys and a play pen. Something – a lot of things, actually – had to go. Out went old files, letters, brochures, catalogs, business cards, bank statements, a metric ton or so of books, investment papers dating to roughly the Carter administration, floppy discs, the mimeograph machine …
Okay, I’m kidding about the mimeograph machine but you get the idea. The books went to the Idaho Youth Ranch, but a lot still remained to be hauled away. Our recycling bin was as tightly packed as Donald Trump’s hairspray cabinet.
The Youth Ranch also was the beneficiary of 16 (this is not a misprint) bags and several boxes of old clothes, thanks to multiple closet purges. I hated to give up my tie-dyed shirts and bell bottom pants, but you can’t save everything.
The family room couch had seen better days so we ordered a new one, which the salesman assured us was likely to arrive before our guests did.
It didn’t.
The flat-screen TV I bought my wife for Christmas was still in its box, so we decided it was time to hook it up to replace the one on the kitchen counter. It was old and clunky, but the one thing I was sure the Youth Ranch would be happy to accept.
It wasn’t. If you can use a clunky, 13-inch color TV in working order at a reasonable price – free – let me know.
The yard had projects I’d been putting off until next year for roughly a decade. Taming the ivy, for example. For years it had been trying to worm its way under the siding, strangling flowers and otherwise misbehaving. It was all I could do to keep it at bay. What was needed was an all-out assault, possibly involving powerful explosives.
For the uninitiated who are thinking of planting ivy, a word of advice. Don’t. Ivy, especially Boston Ivy, is the botanical equivalent of termites and pythons. It destroys siding. It wraps itself around trunks of trees and chokes them. It’s been known to demolish brick chimneys. You’d be better off planting noxious thistle.
English Ivy is almost as bad. The hosts of a banquet my wife and I attended some time ago gave us a basket of English Ivy that had been used as our table’s centerpiece. I planted it in the front yard. By this spring, the erstwhile centerpiece covered roughly 30 square feet and had a death grip on one of my favorite trees.
Wrestling the ivy monsters involved more hard work than I wanted to do, so we took the easy way out and hired someone. He was young and strong, and it was grueling even for him.
In the back yard, I power-washed the deck and happily recalled that it was made of redwood. It had been weathered-gray so long I’d forgotten.
With the yard work finished, we focused on some jobs we’d been putting off indoors. I prepped and painted window sills and molding that were showing their age. My wife cleaned the refrigerator. She was bent over the vegetable drawer and I was on my hands and knees furiously scrubbing a baseboard under a kitchen cabinet when one of our daughters popped in.
“I wish I had a video of you guys,” she said. “You’re working like dogs to do all this stuff your friends will never see.”
She was right. They would never see most of what we’d done.
But we would. Their visit went well, and now that it’s over we’re enjoying a brief interlude of doing next to nothing in a house and yard that require nothing.
Life, where is thy sting?

Tim Woodward’s column appears every other Sunday in The Idaho Statesman and is posted on http://www.woodwardblog.com the following Mondays. Contact him at woodwardcolumn@hotmail.com.

One of the pitfalls of being human is that if we live long enough, we reach a point at which we spend extraordinary amounts of time looking for things that were securely in our possession moments earlier.
We’ve all done it. One minute you have the pen you were using, the charger for your device, your sunglasses, your temper … and the next – poof! Gone – often for an infuriatingly long time.
I once spent over an hour looking for a pair of shoes I’d absentmindedly stashed in the refrigerator while grazing. I was a teenager then, so senility wasn’t a factor. Now, from the perspective of greater age, I know that the chilled shoes were but a harbinger of things to come.
These days, I can lose almost anything in almost no time and with no effort whatsoever. It’s remarkable, and more than a little annoying, how quickly indispensable possessions vanish and how difficult they are to find.
Wallets, for example. I lost mine a couple of years ago, looked everywhere (including the refrigerator) for it and, failing, canceled my debit and credit cards. A few hours later, a woman called to say she’d found it in the middle of a downtown street.
The most frequent offenders, as we all know all too well, are keys, glasses and remotes. A day seldom passes without my losing one or more of these things. One of our remotes is smaller than an iPod and is programmed – the evidence is indisputable – to burrow into the depths of the couch, dematerialize and inexplicably transport itself from room to room.
It doesn’t help that our toddler grandson likes to hide it in the laundry hamper.
One novel and highly successful method of losing things is to put them on the roof of your car and drive away. This was the likely explanation for my lost wallet that was found in the middle of the street. It also has been my method of choice for losing not one but two library books.
If there’s one thing you don’t want to lose, it’s a library book. I learned this the hard way a number of years ago by putting one on the roof of my car and driving off to a destination now forgotten. The consequences, however, are remembered indelibly.
Some books would be almost criminal to lose – classics, first editions, out-of-print books, books signed by their authors … Happily, this was none of those. It was a novel by Fannie Flagg. “Fried Green Tomatoes,” the movie, was big at the time and it made me want to read another of her books, which happily was in print, not a classic or first edition and not autographed.
But replacing it was, shall we say, a process. An expensive process. When a librarian explained how much it would be for the library to purchase a new copy, put one of those impregnable library covers on it and do whatever else is required to put it into circulation, my knees got weak. Fillings have been replaced for less.
Granted, it was a hardcover edition. But still …
“How much would it be if I bought a copy and brought it in to you?” I asked the librarian.
“Well, that would save you some money.”
This was in the days before almost any book you think of could be purchased with a couple of keystrokes. The options then were yard sales and used book stores. It took a while – quite a while, actually – but luck was on my side. Triumphantly, I returned to the library with a used but serviceable copy and waited while the librarian totaled up the fees.
They were less than replacing a filling, but considering that I’d bought the book myself, still a bit of a shock. I vowed never to lose a library book again – and didn’t.
Until a recent trip through Oregon. We stopped in Baker City for lunch at a restaurant with a model railroad running from table to table, something you don’t see every day, and reached our destination uneventfully that evening.
Well, not quite uneventfully.
“Have you seen my library book?” I asked my wife.
“No. When’s the last time you saw it?”
“In the car when we stopped in Baker City.”
That’s when her sister, who was following us in her car when we left the restaurant, dropped the bomb:
“I wondered if that was your book?”
“What book?”
“The one lying in the road right after we left the restaurant. The car behind you ran over it.”
Once again, I’d left a library book on the roof of the car and unwittingly driven away.
Even an old blind dog gets a bone once in a while, though. The library’s total this time, book and fees: a comparatively trifling $16. Apparently Fannie Flagg commands a higher price than Larry McMurtry.
Speaking of the library, I was there a few days ago, reached for my library card in my wallet and noticed that my driver’s license was missing. Retracing my steps and checking with lost-and-found departments yielded nothing. Another case of just plain gone. Poof! Thin air!
Which is why this must end. I have to get to the Department of Motor Vehicles before it closes.

Tim Woodward’s column appears every other Sunday in The Idaho Statesman and is posted on http://www.woodwardblog.com the following Mondays. Contact him at woodwardcolumn@hotmail.com.