Ammi Midstokke: The magic of inanimate objects

For most of my life, I’ve not really believed in magic. I’ve been more of a suspicious observer of the inexplicable. The analytical mind can sometimes placate itself with the reasoning that one doesn’t necessarily need to understand everything. One can just accept them as a reality.

What I have accepted is that inanimate objects have a life of their own. I assumed this even before reading Tom Robbins, but the evidence had been irrefutable in my home for some time. If I had to pinpoint when, I’d say right about the time my child started walking. It was around then I noticed shoes would catapult themselves into the toilet.

Some objects seem more inclined to relocate than others, some disappeared entirely, and others demonstrated a remarkable capacity to reproduce. Dishes in particular. Any time a dish was left unchaperoned in the sink, I would discover cutlery and cup offspring within moments. Should my coffee mug be set there in the morning, by the end of the day, the waste of a six-meal service had appeared. For reasons I did not understand, ketchup was often involved.

I learned that shoes do not prefer racks, shelves, cubbies, drawers, closets, or bins. They mostly prefer a space beneath the bar stools in the kitchen. A single pair gets lonely and tends to invite other pairs over for the kind of shoe party mayhem that only adolescent feet can produce: Soggy, shredded Chucks piled next to goth boots on top of Birkenstocks. Sometimes they’d let a dirty sock in on things, like a kid sister who tagged along.

I have spent nearly two decades encouraging things back into the homes I’ve made for them. Curated bookshelves with knickknacks, the classics carefully separated from the contemporaries (they mostly bicker anyway). Closets with the shirts organized by sleeve length and thickness. Drawers where shorts and pants are never forced to mingle. Only the undergarments have a free-for-all and seem to get along, regardless of fashion or function.

Every kitchen counter that ever served my family had a corner that appeared a magnet for random items of no correlation. A pile of hair clips next to a giant portfolio of watercolors on top of an iPad. An empty can wearing a fingerless glove on a pile of Mardi Gras beads wrapped around half a candy bar. A toothbrush. A t-shirt. A boxed slice of pie. A can of whipped cream.

Sometimes I suspected someone was actually moving the things, but any time I ever asked, “Who left this bowl of french fries in the bathroom?” I was met with silence.

I knew it could only be that things in my house were conspiring, perhaps staging an inanimate uprising. A row of small toys appeared on my bedroom door frame. Tiny plastic babies rested in my boots. My favorite sweaters migrated into my teenager’s room to consort with his sweaters where they developed the telltale signs of illicit activity: Orange soda stains.

For years, I have been so busy with the full-time job of picking things up and washing prolific, fertile dishes, I did not have the capacity to observe these things in their natural habitat, to catch them in the act. Just when I’d surrendered myself to this silent struggle of humanity as an inevitable charge of my existence, it stopped.

The dishes are barren. The ketchup is getting old. There are no ecology projects evolving in abandoned mugs of hot chocolate in my kid’s room. There are no pairs of sweaty gym shorts hanging off the back of dining chairs.

I’ve harbored a silent fear for a while now: that when my kid grew up, I would discover I was responsible for all the mystical excursions of miscellany. I have been gaslit on many occasion to believe the relocation of my charging cable was my own doing. It was not.

Whatever spell was upon my house all these years, the pox appears to have been lifted. Things stay where I put them. The house remains tidy for entire days. I think even the dogs are shedding less.

What I will do with all this new free time, I have no idea, but when people ask me how I’m adjusting to the empty nest, I simply say, “Well, some of the magic is gone.”

Ammi Midstokke can be contacted at ammim@spokesman.com