By Marla Boone

Contributing columnist

Some decisions are easy. Should I cut the grass for the final time this season now or wait? Obviously, the answer is “wait.” Always wait to cut the grass. It’s possible, although not probable, that a terrible grass disease will come along and kill all the grass, making cutting it unnecessary. In a perfect world, the terrible grass disease will also kill your neighbor’s grass so that you are not subjected to your neighbor’s looking askance at your dead lawn. In an extremely perfect world, the grass disease will also kill all the shrubbery that needs trimmed.

Some decisions are hard. They may not sound like hard decisions but choose badly and they will come back to bite you.

Sometimes it takes years to find out if you’ve made a good decision or a bad one. For a long time I lived in a large house. It had a large basement. It had a large two and a half car garage. It had a large heated workshop. It had a large garden shed. Everything about it was large, including the amount of stuff it held. Then, a house I had waited thirty-eight years to go on the market, remarkably, went on the market. I bought it immediately. This was, not to put too fine a point on it, not a large house. It had no basement. The attic was unusable for storage. I really didn’t need a large house with a large etc. etc. etc. so I called a local charity and told them to bring a big truck to haul away my problem. “No, wait,” I said. “Bring two big trucks.” I had very little time to vacate the old house so those easy vs. hard decisions we just discussed were made with three, sometimes, four seconds of “does-it-stay-or-does-it-go?” thought. A whole bunch of it went.

I am happily ensconced in the new house but the storage issue won’t go away. The storage issue being I don’t have any. I have hammered up walls of shelves until I required a new shoulder. (I am not making this up.) I have populated Marketplace with yet more castoffs. I have (oh, the humanity) stacked things inside each other even though it makes everything more difficult to use. In the penultimate act of a desperate woman, the thing she does just before she gets seven cats and says “Oh the heck with it” I bought several large storage bins to stack in my outbuilding. My thought was (and yes, there was a little thought behind this), I will put the items I seldom use but still find necessary in a neatly labeled storage bin and then, on the rare occasion I need it, I’ll know precisely where it is.

I should have just gotten the cats. There was an item that had been sitting on my kitchen counter for weeks and I hate things sitting on my kitchen counter. Back when I had the big house, I had acres of counter space and not one item sat on it. One of my friends said it looked like an operating room. After all those days of glaring at it, I decided to put the item in question in a storage bin. This involves ladders, much hoisting (love to test that new shoulder), grunting, and the thought that I live alone and if I fall off that ladder and break a hip, no one will find me until the local coyotes move in for the smorgasbord. I hauled out the label maker and put a new label on the bin. Everything was going exactly according to plan, which is what happens right before the plan falls apart.

Less than one week after I stored the item, I, of course, needed it. Out to the building, up the ladder, cue the coyotes, and look for the dang thing. It was from the lovely view at the top of the ladder that I noticed the small pile of debris on the floor below. Every label, every single label, had fallen off.

Marla Boone resides in Covington and writes for Miami Valley Today