It’s that time of year again. I can tell not so much by dogwoods in bloom as by the fact that my wife is inventorying supplies and asking me what my plans are for next Thursday and Friday. That undoubtedly means she has spring cleaning in mind and expects me to help.

And I do help—if not gladly at least not too grudgingly. But our spring cleaning experiences bring attention to the fact that people are different, even when they’ve been married for nearly 10 lustrum (a lustrum is a period of 5 years, in case you were wondering).

My wife has a low-invasive approach to cleaning. She takes one room at a time; cleaning items and the furniture they were sitting on and then moving on to the next room.

My method is to dump nearly everything in the house into one of three piles. In the first pile goes stuff we definitely will keep. The second pile is stuff we may keep or cull. And the third pile contains stuff that obviously is to be thrown away.

I don’t understand how that third pile gets so big in just a year’s time. I mean, we don’t buy a lot of needless junk and we try to get as much mileage as possible out of what we do buy. I’m part Scottish and I believe on the old Scots proverb: Get what you can and keep what you get.

We’re also faithful recyclers. I regularly tote aluminum cans, plastic bottles, newspapers and magazines to the recycling center. I haul old metal to the scrap yard and buy my pickup parts at A & J Auto Salvage. So we should have only things in the house and garage that are currently being used. Right?

Don’t you believe it. Every spring we come up with a mountain of material to sell, give away or throw out—usually to throw out. I’m not sure how we acquire so many disposable possessions in just a year.

“I believe there’s a natural law that governs this kind of thing,” said Art Finley, my neighbor and sometime fishing partner. “In a short time, stuff will accumulate to fill the space available, plus a little bit.”

Art may be onto something there. All I know is that it takes a lot of time and elbow grease to get rid of stuff I didn’t know we had in the first place.

All of which may explain why a good many recycled products cost more than those made from new materials. It’s the cost of all that sorting and sifting, packing and hauling.

I do dearly love the idea of tall stories told to children. Not only are the children entertained, but the idea that an adult can come up with fanciful ideas is comforting to a child who doesn’t see much hope for grownups in the make believe department. In the Ozarks, no child has ever had to worry much about that.

Even in the north part of Missouri where I grew up there were tellers of “stretchers” and “big windies” like my Uncle Frank, who loved to test the credulity of children. He once told me that in World War I, being out of ammunition, he captured a squad of Germans by pointing his empty gun at their trench and yelling “BANG BANG!” at which point the enemy bailed out and surrendered to him. Uncle Frank said “bang” is the German word for “calf rope,” which in Missouri means give up. When I confronted him with that whimsical story years later, he said he told it just to prepare me for politician’s speeches when I was grown.

In the Ozarks, everybody understands the value of a “big windy” story. They grew up with them long before radio or TV furnished all the fantasy a kid needs. Mountain lion, bear, timber wolf and snake stories were easy to conjure, as were eagles that carried off 5-year-old kids and monster snapping turtles that the teller saw “drownin’ a growed hog.” And if these weren’t enough to startle and mesmerize a child, Ozarkers had a battery of other mysterious creatures to offer, Gowrows and Gallynippers, and the Willipus-Wallipus, which could “eat a little Buford in two or three bites—a’startin with his feet.”

“It don’t hurt a kid to hear tales,” I was always told, “keeps ’em busy thinkin’ and out of trouble.”

I must admit that growing up in Missouri, I was always convinced that we were the masters of telling outrageous stories to kids. But when I told this to my wife, Diana, who is from Texas, she set me straight. She told me that her dad, a career army man, once drove his family to New York City to board a ship to France. To keep his two small girls busy, he told them to watch closely for people’s eyes. He told them that as you went east, crossing all those states, people’s eyes got closer and closer together, until finally in New York City people just had one eye in the middle of their foreheads. The children were kept busy peering into oncoming cars and at people in towns they passed, looking for closer-set eyes.

Now this was a long time ago, but I’m one Missouri story stretcher who will freely admit a Texas father out did me in the tall story department. Because Diana said nobody on that trip asked “Are we there yet?”