For years, I've barely thrown anything out

In Rachel Resnicks home office, stacks of books, magazines and other paperwork had taken over.

By Rachel Resnick

Dec. 30, 2004 12 AM PT

Special to The Times

SOMETHING’S growing in my garage.

“Please remove the junk,” say the landlords.

I promise the landlords I’ll deal, but somehow I don’t. When I try — and I do try — I stand paralyzed, unable to tug even one rain-soaked cardboard box, wilted sports bra or crumpled magazine from the Kilimanjaro of crud.

I gape. Then I get in the truck, drive away and forget.

“It’s a fire hazard,” say the landlords. They’re married, Midwestern, therapists. They’re patient, polite, gentle, over a period of one, two, three years. Until they threaten to hire a trash hauler.

“It’s not all trash! I just need to sort it.” But psychologically and physically I’m quicksand stuck. For almost two decades I’ve barely thrown anything out, just squirreled it away.

As a kid, I went through phases where I collected stamps, coins, antique bottles, sea glass, stones with rings around them, horseshoe crabs, fireflies, plastic beads, crazy socks, Siamese cats, Matchbox cars, Peggy Nisbet costume dolls, Partridge Family cards, WackyPacks ChapStick caps. Get rid of the collection of daily life?

A professional organizer might fire the starting gun.

Regina Leeds, award-winning Zen organizer, Brooklynite and former “The Young and the Restless” soap actress, taps a perfectly lacquered nail on a bare wall of my bedroom/home office. She pivots gracefully in Mephisto clogs, frowns.

“Did you know the way you have your desk positioned, your ideas fly right out the window?”

I step back, bump into a stack, turn my ankle and send old magazines slithering over the carpet like flat, glossy snakes.

“And the men all leave because your bed faces the door!” says Regina, smiling a brilliant I-can-fix-all-this smile. Me, I rub my ankle and turn puce, the season’s color for shame and panic.

Regina’s here to assess the clutter problem and plan our five-hour organizational session four days later. At $100 an hour, Regina usually deals with far wealthier clients, from CEOs to celebrities. I am a fiction writer and a teacher. My whole place could probably fit in one of their pool cabanas.

“The space is inadequate. We’ll have to be really creative to fit everything,” she says.

Hazardous piles of books and papers. Over the years, the tools of my trade have staged a subtle takeover right under my ski-slope nose. A coup d’état of texts.

Regina sends me to IKEA to purchase three new bookcases — one for current projects and two others, tall and narrow, for my literary collection. To catch the ideas zooming out the window, she suggests I buy chandelier crystals to hang there and reflect light.

Together we archive old files, set up current files for writing projects, bills and other subjects. We’ll build bookcases, shelve books. We’ll use Regina’s magic formula: eliminate, categorize, organize.

Regina says, “It’s time for change. Think about things you cling to that are in the way.” She leaves in a cloud of fairy dust mingled with mundane exhaust.

I think about obstacles and evil spells, sentimental journeys, the tyranny of stuff, the lure of change. In Regina’s book, “The Zen of Organizing,” she writes that broken, frayed things “speak of poverty and carelessness.”

When I pile these many damaged things on the couch, they cry out for a gurney.

That night, I dismantle the shrine I put up almost three years ago for Lima, the pet parrot I lost to a bobcat. I do it fast so I can’t think. When I finish, I’m breathless.

I light a stick of Indian temple incense, swig some wine and contemplate the well-oiled wheel of life.

I manage to avoid the albatross of books and papers until the eve of Regina’s return. I pretty up the stacks, move a few around, hope she won’t notice the lack of prep. She shows up in a plain white T-shirt. I’m in sweats. We’re serious. Regina brings a silent, thin male assistant who builds the two large bookcases.

Regina’s been called an “elegant pain in the neck” for her silky persistence, and it works. File after file disappears into the flip-top containers and slides out to the deck. We organize at warp speed. But before we finish even the first round of piles, the five hours are kaput.

When Regina is ready to leave, it looks as if a bomb went off. Things explode over every available surface. Regina wears a stricken look as she walks onto the deck and glances back at me sorrowfully. “I’ve never left a client like this!”

She’s also never had a client who did her own shopping, I remind her. I’m a shiny apple student. I’ll ace this! She’ll see. I’m a changed woman.

The first space to be completely and utterly transformed was the mini-room where I store clothes. Regina, frustrated perhaps at the “inadequate” space and time for the task, tackled this room during that frenzied five-hour session, determined to make it a showroom of decluttered harmony.

After our session, I find myself sitting in this model room with newly cleared carpet space that seems vast as a prairie.

There’s something contained, even contemplative in the air.

I sit on a newly purchased cheetah-print footstool/storage box that I bought impulsively on sale ($29.99) at Bed, Bath & Beyond.

I am Beyond, glimpsing the world behind clutter.