One August Sunday afternoon when it was raining – again – and I was wandering around the house looking for something constructive to do, it dawned on me that I ought to clean out the cellar way. That would cut down on the risk of catching my foot in the blue pail or the shaggy dust mop and landing in a broken heap at the foot of the cellar stairs.

I don’t know how all that stuff ended up in the 4-by-4-foot cranny that is the cellar way. But there it was – the two half-full bags of grass seed in the small blue wastebasket; the two cans of paint holding the colors of the kitchen and the living room woodwork; the loose pieces of fine-grit sandpaper; and the green plastic plant pots filled with desiccated peat moss. Messy, but in an interesting sort of way because it was all packed in there in a more or less orderly way.

I hoed it out and piled everything in the middle room until I could figure out how to reorganize. Right away I saw that I needed apple crates.

Apple crates have been my decorating and organizing ally for as long as I can remember. In one house, I piled three on top of one another and made the most perfect set of bookshelves I’d ever had. In another house I placed one on end beside the couch and kept tall books in it. The top served as an end table where I kept the sand-filled frog and the little inlaid wooden box that cheered my eye every time I glanced in that direction.

In one apartment where I lived many years ago, I placed two apple crates end-to-end for a coffee table. When I finally got a real coffee table the apple crates served as toy boxes.

An apple crate also served as THE premier container for LP vinyl records.

But somehow over the years, as I moved from house to apartment to house, as my sons grew up and went off to lives of their own, my apple crates

disappeared. And there I was, home alone, hoeing out the cellar way and needing apple crates.

In my neighborhood it’s fairly easy to acquire apple crates, but the source must remain nameless because it doesn’t have many to spare.

I located one apple crate in my attic and acquired another from my secret source. I stacked them against the back wall of the cellar way. On the bottom space of the stack I set all of my small flower vases – the ones I’ve lugged home from the transfer station, also known as the dump, or found for minute amounts of money at thrift shops and yard sales. These include milk glass, cobalt blue glass, pottery and clear glass pickle jars.

On the next “shelf,” I arranged all those little cans of paint in colonial colors I can’t part with yet because I still have two old birdhouses that need sprucing up. Plus, I never know when I might want to stencil something in old red or country green or tavern blue. And who knows what beat-up old relic of a stool or table or chair will come my way and need a coat of paint to perk it up – like that quaint little table someone made from a packing crate, which I found at a yard sale in Bingham.

On the top shelf of the apple crates, I set my cordless drill, the box of drill bits, my saber saw and my ratchet wrench set – with sockets in both inches and millimeters – thoughtfully provided by my sons.

The rag bag hanging from a hook in the cellar way impeded my progress, but I scrunched that out of the way and still had room to tuck away the small pieces of pine board I need when I pound holes in book covers when I make blank journals.

The other stuff – the ancient bicycle pump, the grass seed, the gray squishy pipe insulation tubes and the stack of green paper strawberry boxes – I lugged to the garage. I’ll deal with that stuff on another rainy day.

But I may need more apple crates.

Ardeana Hamlin welcomes suggestions. Call 990-8153, or e-mail ahamlin@bangordailynews.net.