Bag your enthusiasm

Where should I put this? But be nice about it.

Ipswich has no small number of antique homes, some approaching 400 years of age. Mine, turning 209 this summer, would be listed by an Ipswich realtor as “new construction.”

It follows then, that Ipswich has precious little storage space. The colonists were too busy scrounging for food and navigating relations with the area’s previous residents to spend time building big, complicated houses.

So it was slam-bam — floor, walls and windows, roof, fireplace and chimney, done. Get inside as quick as you can because (a) the weather, (b) the bugs, (c) animals even larger and hungrier than the bugs.

So today, you buy an antique house, and? Forget your dreams of a walk-in closet, your fantasy of floor-to-ceiling cupboards. You’re about to learn the real reason Yankees have such a reputation for parsimony. It’s not reluctance to spend money. It’s why buy it when there’s no place to put it?

In my kitchen, there’s a painfully narrow door — circa 1695, scavenged by the home’s original owners — which opens on a tiny space we call a pantry. It might have originally served as a place to store the family muskets.

Along one wall, someone managed to install three slender shelves. With storage space at such a premium, we have no choice but to organize these slim ledges in manic detail.

#1. The top shelf is where we keep the family poisons: things that kill or at least cause painful damage.

·  A glop which should not be eaten because it’s for shining your silver.

·  Some goo, not to be mistaken for peanut butter, which will restore your leather.

·  Sprays for killing certain species of animal life, mostly purchased in moments of panic because said certain species has suddenly appeared. Things whose labels claim they will kill you or at least ruin your day if you’re an ant, mosquito, wasp, fly, mouse, rat, or small child.

(There’s also a mysterious “unscented odor-eliminator” I don’t remember buying, which means someone must have given it to me, which is embarrassing, or insulting, I’m not sure which.)

#2. The middle shelf is for things electrical. There are lightbulbs of various sizes and styles. Innumerable ready-to-use batteries of every imaginable variety, including those ridiculous specialty batteries that go into appliances foolishly designed to use batteries that don’t fit anywhere else.

There’s also the all-important large plastic zip-lock which serves as a body bag for spent batteries. This is where they go after they’ve given their all, because you’re not supposed to put dead batteries in the trash — especially button-shaped batteries, which contain mercury. And as everyone knows because we heard it on the radio so often we can never un-hear it (sing it with me now): “Don’t put mercury in the trash.”

(When the body bag is full, the cadavers have to be sorted. According to the Ipswich town website, the transfer station takes rechargeable, lithium-ion, vehicle, and household batteries for recycling. Rechargeables can also go to Tedford’s, Best Buy, and Staples. Button batteries — for watches, hearing aids, remote car starters, etc. — go to any of three offices at Town Hall: Treasurer, Public Works, or Council on Aging.)

#3. The bottom shelf is the problem.

That big boom we all heard on Saturday? They said it was a meteor. No, it was my kitchen pantry exploding. Not the whole pantry. Just the stuff on the bottom shelf.

That’s where we keep the cat food — stacks of cans, plus a big plastic bin full of kibble, plus a big bag of kibble for refilling the big plastic bin when it’s empty, because heaven forbid a cat should ever have to miss a helping of kibble.

On this same little shelf, beyond the feline foodstuffs, are the bags. Maybe I’m too extreme an environmentalist, but I can’t just throw out a perfectly serviceable bag. It may be useful later! There could be a bag shortage!

So when I acquire a bag, I fold it and add it to the lineup on the shelf: a hilarious hodgepodge of sizes and colors and types of bags. Bagapalooza.

But the bottom shelf is only so wide. You can’t just keep adding bags forever.

As I discovered on Saturday.

To be honest, it’s been a highly pressurized situation for quite a number of months. With so many bags in there, I always have to pry open a space between two of them to make room for another.

For a long time, the overall physics seemed to work okay: The stacked cat food cans press against the plastic kibble bin, which presses against the kibble bag, which presses against the first bag in line, and all the bags stand firmly at attention because they’re under such extreme compression.

On Saturday, however, the system suffered a serious failure.

I came home from the grocery store, put my purchases away, and found myself with three perfectly good, newly empty bags. I folded them neatly, opened the pantry door, pried open a space in the middle of the bag line, and forced the new arrivals into place. No problem. I closed the pantry door and went about my business.

But now, the physics turned nasty on me.

You may think one of the bags was finally too tight. Au contraire. One of the bags wasn’t tight enough.

Under such intense pressure, the weakest link finally gives way. That one bag, less snug than the others by only the slightest fraction, began to slowly squish out of that ultra-tight formation.

And then, at a certain moment, the slightest vibration could be the tipping point.

Maybe there was a bit of a change in barometric pressure. Maybe the earth wobbled imperceptibly in its orbit. Maybe it was just our overweight cat walking into the kitchen.

In any case, the pantry door blew open with the boom of an eruption, the contents of the bottom shelf splattered: the beheaded plastic bin blasting kibble everywhere; tin cans, some dented on impact, rolling in all directions; and bags, bags, bags sailing like frisbees, skating in circles across the 1797 wide-pine floorboards.

Lesson learned.

But it wasn’t just a matter of sweeping up the kibble and re-stacking the tins of cat food. The bag-storage system had to be radically revised.

And so it is. Today, you can visit my kitchen safely, with no fear of another pantry-blast.

No, we didn’t simply throw out the bags. Of course not. Bags are important to my quality of life.

We just culled the herd.

And — we organized. The bottom shelf of the kitchen pantry is now something like a library, with sections. To the left: Cats. To the right, Bags — as follows:

Section A:  Full-size brown-paper grocery bags, not too many. But you need some of them because they’re perfect for consolidating and lugging smaller recyclables out to the bin in the garage.

Section B:  Smaller paper bags — great for compostables on their way out for weekly curbside pickup.

Section C:  Gift bags — symbols of a civilized society: At some point you received a gift in it, at some point you’ll give a gift in it. (A thin, stiff bag made of translucent organza is so sheer and so pretty, you keep it so you’ll have it when you have something really special to put in it.)

Section D:  A durable bag with handles and a logo — like Avon (great bags) or Rotary — might be ideal for storing collections of stuff, like all the magnets you were happy to take off the fridge when it died, but you feel guilty just throwing them out.

Section E:  Sturdy plastic totes and tote-type bags — bags too good to send off with recycling. Keep these for carrying stuff that’s damp (think Crane Beach) or keeping dry stuff separated from damp stuff.

Standing apart, on its own: the prized Plaza Hotel bag. It’s so sturdy, and so good-looking, it now serves as the receptacle for all the plastic bags. The bag of bags. It survived the great explosion of 2026; now it’s acclaimed as the greatest bag of all.