Storage Units Are Like Amebas

Have you ever noticed that storage sheds seem to multiply like rabbits?
There ought to be some way of identifying the gender on a storage unit. The gender really doesn’t seem to matter, though; if you get one shed, next thing you know you have three or four.
Personally, I suspect they are like amebas; they simply reproduce by dividing and forming new units. They always do it when you are not looking. They are tricky that way.
The genetics on storage units must be quirky, too. Have you ever noticed how the offspring look nothing like the parental units?
For instance, sturdy little units built in the forties with white clapboard and wooden frame windows invariably are attracted to units from the sixties, like cheap trophy wives built out of pressboard siding with aluminum windows. Next to them is the inevitable beat-up metal building they gave birth to in the seventies and the plastic building they adopted from a home improvement store recently.
There ought to be a law that requires all storage units to be biodegradable and self-destructing in less than twenty years.
This would eliminate the intuitive need we all feel to save things for our grandchildren.
What is it about Americans that we love our junk?
For some reason, like loyalty in a dysfunctional family, we cling to the promise of security that keeping stuff offers.
Cleaning out a unit would require us to sort through all the clutter we’ve been collecting out there in the shed.
That is the pressboard shed, not the one that would make a delightful little cottage playhouse or the run-down metal shed where the bikes stay dry or the plastic shed where the flat basketballs, Christmas decorations, and antique furniture pile up to create hours of fun for grandchildren..
I have a friend who finally broke down and put a shed in his back yard for the lawn mower.
“You’ll wake up one morning and look out in the back yard and there will be a whole family of storage units,” I warned him.
Maybe that’s a good thing. More storage units means less lawn to mow.
If he doesn’t have to mow his yard, he won’t need his mower which means he won’t have go past the other units which are certain to start gathering in his back yard like a clandestine meeting of junk collectors.
All of which means his great grandchildren will think the lawn mower is a quaint antique some day when they clean out the unit to make a cute, little cottage playhouse.

Cathy Primer Krafve, aka Checklist Charlie, lives and writes with a Texas twang. Comments are welcome at cathyrafve@gmail.com.