LETTERS FROM HOME: THE SOUND OF KNICKKNACKS IN THE BASEMENT

June 1, 1995

Dear Nick and Christine,

How is baby Cole? Approaching 1 year old, ready to surf? Growing up, I was always envious of kids in California. One came to town for a visit in the summer, and soon everyone knew a kid from California was in town.

We just assumed he'd been on "American Bandstand."

You were in my dream last night, Christine. We were saying goodbye to each other. You cried and cried and tenderly kissed me. I awoke wondering what it means, and guess I'm wondering if everything is OK with you.

Everything is OK with me. Except for a little problem with accumulation. The urge to acquire, collect, recondition and store has never stirred in me, but quite possibly may be DC's raison d'etre.

This reality stared me right in the eyes last fall when we were packing to leave California for Missouri. It took three days to get all the knickknacks -- uh, collectibles -- safely packed and stored in the moving van.

Now our basement is filled with boxes containing knickknacks. I can hear them down there, multiplying.

We have a three-bedroom house with a living room, den, dining room, kitchen, two porches and 1 1/2 baths, and there's no place to put the knickknacks.

A few days ago, perhaps in penance or thinking wishfully, she asked that no Christmas presents be given to her this year.

DC's mother suggested I gift wrap one of the boxes in the basement for her present.

But Christmas isn't the problem. It's this urge to collect, a condition, which in DC's case, has deteriorated into scavenging.

A month or so ago, in the spirit of spring cleaning, the city offered to pick up the citizens' trash, old furniture and appliances at the curb. So DC -- and she was far from alone -- cruised the neighborhoods looking for new things to put in the basement.

One night she showed up at work needing help. So there I was at 11 at night, helping her wrestle an antique pink marble sink from a stranger's sidewalk into the bed of our pickup.

"I can't believe they threw this away," she kept saying.

"There's gotta be something wrong with it," was my mantra.

When we got home, the back porch was decorated with five chairs the midnight marauder had liberated from trash heaps. Two of them even matched.

One was such a mess she agreed to transfer it immediately onto our own trash pile. Now reconditioned, the matching chairs fit right in at her parents' rustic cabin. Of the other two chairs, one sits on our front porch, one on the back porch. I have noticed that no one sits in them.

We found the crack in the sink the day after the raid. She thinks it still will make a good birdbath.

Now she's found a wall for the front yard. It's not wall yet. Only huge sandstone rocks that are part of the foundation of an old house that's being torn down.

The owner of the house is going to load the rocks into a dump truck and then deposit them into our back yard, next to the sink.

By that time, DC assures me, we will have figured out how to move 200-pound boulders to the front yard and stack them neatly into a wall.

It now occurs to me what that dream may have represented. Maybe I finally was saying goodbye to California.

With all these boxes to unpack and chairs to sit in and, like Sisyphus, these boulders to rearrange, we could never move back. Home is where the backyard sink is.

Love, Sam

~Sam Blackwell is a staff writer for the Southeast Missourian.