FINALLY: WHAT COMES DOWN FROM THE ATTIC STAYS DOWN FROM THE ATTIC

NOVEMBER 25, 2025 – As we settle in for Thanksgiving week at our son/daughter-in-law’s home, I’m reminded how household stuff accumulates—yard and garden tools and machinery in the garage; furniture and furnishings in every room; toys galore—big, small, and everything in between—in the “bonus room”-turned-toddler’s dreamland of toys; closets—don’t open the doors or you won’t get them closed again; basement rec room now serving as an on-site warehouse facility.

Anyone who’s lived in a house for long knows what I’m talking about. In our case, however, my wife and I didn’t need to fly to Connecticut to be reminded how stuff accumulates. We’d faced the problem head-on (or nearly so) the day before. Here’s how it came down . . . so to speak.

For the first time in a couple of decades, I seized the initiative to retrieve our—more accurately, “my wife’s”—Christmas decorations from the attic over the garage. Unless you’re looking for trouble, this is a place you don’t want to visit. In the first place, accessing the space requires an operation the first part of which is best described as “removing a 3’ x 4’ rectangular manhole cover in an upside down world.”  In other words, you have to place the top of an aluminum extension ladder against the front end of the lid covering the opening to the attic—a lid that weighs as much as a real manhole cover—and shove . . . thus creating enough space between the lid (which is now resting against the front of the ladder) and the frame of the garage ceiling, to rest the back of the ladder against said frame; you then climb a few rungs up the ladder until—with both hands—you can maneuver the whole lid out of the way, giving yourself enough room to crawl from ladder to attic.

Whatever skill set is required to complete this manhole removal process, I don’t possess it. My wife does, and when she sees me try, she comments accordingly. Yesterday, I had enough sense to “do it my way” when she wasn’t around to witness. “My way” scares me. It involves a heightened risk of losing my balance while holding the heavy lid and falling backwards off the ladder and onto the concrete garage floor—without a happy outcome.

In the event, I managed without incident. I then went back inside the house, caught up with my wife and said, “If you’re feeling energetic, maybe we could tackle the Christmas decorations—while it’s so warm. Better to be hauling the stuff down now than when it’s 10[F] degrees out.”

“You’re right,” she said, reluctantly.

Soon her knees were on the attic floor and her feet were sticking out over the top of the ladder. By the light of her phone[1] she was taking stock of which of the many bins and boxes she wanted to lower down to earth. I stood below, clearing a place to stand to receive the lights, wreathes, and packed-up Santas, nutcrackers, Christmas village houses, Christmas tree ornaments, and other sundry decorations. Some of the containers were lightweight and harmless. Others weighed a ton. A number of things were on their own—plastic garland (some with hooks); plastic holly, a large plastic tree-top star; a metal, two-foot high sculpture of a stylized hybrid snowman and Dickens figure; another, three-foot high multi-colored square standing stylized Santa made from razor-sharp pieces of metal.

Suddenly, loose items rained down from the opening. Beth hadn’t realized where I was standing, and I didn’t know she was in a “git ‘er done” mode. I dodged the holly but not a piece of harmless garland. Then came the . . . bomb.

Fortunately, I was not standing in the drop zone, but I was close enough for the CRASH-RING-BING-BANG sound of the razor metal Santa hitting the concrete, bouncing, hitting again, bouncing, and scraping to a stop. “Oops!” said Beth. “It slipped out of my grip.” Amazingly, Santa survived unscathed. Tough cookie. As am I. Or maybe in both cases it’s “just plain lucky.”

The rest of the downloading proceeded without incident. “It’s light” or “It’s heavy,” Beth would say, as she lowered a bin or a box. –“Got it,” I’d say, once I had control of the container. Teamwork. We could hire out. But we both acknowledged that most of the stuff is not returning to the attic or going anywhere else on the premises. Tackling the problem of “too much stuff” starts with Christmas overstock that spends eleven months in the attic.

After Beth returned to earth and went back inside, I ferried all Christmas goods onto the back porch, where they could be more easily accessed from the house. One last step remained: returning the “manhole cover” to its place in the opening to the attic. To avoid hearing, “I don’t know why you take that all the way off instead of just leaning it up inside the attic,” I proceeded on my own. This was a dicey operation. I readily imagined overestimating my strength and underestimating the weight and tipping point of the clumsy lid. Falling backwards off the ladder, I thought, was not an acceptable option.

Our neighbors across the alley, Stephanie and Eliud, were also taking full advantage of the weather and stringing up Christmas lights on the back of their house. These folks, always willing to lend a hand, were a logical resource to enlist. But pride got in my way; not so much pride as reluctance—reluctance to acknowledge both sides of the same coin of life: I’m getting older at the same time I’m not getting any younger. (Sorry; with that redundancy I was just checking to make sure you were awake.) I grabbed the lid by its figurative lapels and slid it slowly and firmly up the sides of the aluminum ladder. I then lifted the covering to one side in a variation of the exam question I remember from the Iowa Basic Skills test we took every year in grade school.

The problem in that IQ test that was never called an IQ test presented a rectangle that the instructions described as a doorway and a pole that was slightly longer than the doorway was tall. We were then to answer “yes” or “no”—to the question whether the pole would fit through the doorway. It didn’t take long for me to circle “yes,” since there were two ways not simply one to carry the pole through—straight through, of course, and by turning it diagonally. In fitting the lid through the opening into the attic, I relied on both conceptual methods to position the lid into place. I was relieved when I’d returned the awkward “upside down manhole cover” and the ladder to their status quo ante.

Before closing the garage door, I looked across our driveway and the alley to check on Stephanie and Eliud’s progress. By now, Eliud was up on the roof, attaching another string of lights to the back gable. “Hey, Steph and Eliud!” I called out. “I’ve got three things to say to you two . . .”

“Hi,” said Stephanie. Eliud is always quiet, but he smiled when I’d approached.

“First off,” I said, “I want you to know that I refused to ask you two for help lifting the cover to our attic opening back into place. As you might’ve noticed, Beth and I just pulled down all our Christmas stuff from the garage attic.

“Second, don’t ask me to help you, especially up on the roof, Eliud. I don’t want to kill myself.” Both Stepanie and Eliud chuckled.

“Third, and most important, I just wanna tell you how much Beth and I appreciate your efforts putting up Christmas lights on the back of your house. You’ve done a great job with your backyard, and we enjoy looking at it from the back of our house and porch. For over 30 years there was nothing to cheer about back here. Now there is.”

“Thanks,” said Stephanie. Eliud allowed a smile.

“And have a Happy Thanksgiving,” I said.

“You too!” I heard, as I moved to cross the alley back to our house.

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© 2025 by Eric Nilsson

[1] Necessitated by the fact that 38 years ago on one of my first trips into the attic of our then “new house” (but constructed in 1940), I managed to yank the long chain of the solitary lightbulb right off the fixture. Given the light’s awkward location, I haven’t gotten around to replacing the chain—or hiring someone else to do it.