Nature abhores a vacuum; I abhore it more

First published 3 November 2006

I’ve recently discovered that I will have to amend the epitaph I’ve planned for my tombstone.

It used to read: “Nature abhors a vacuum, but here lies a woman who abhorred it more.”

Now, it will have to read: “Nature abhors a vacuum, but here lies a woman who’s realized that a vacuum can be a beautiful thing.”

I know that re-branding your tombstone seems a radical thing to do, and believe me, I don’t take my epitaph changes lightly.

But you want to get these things right in the “proofing” stages because sending an engraved tombstone back for re-chiseling at the last minute is not going to be cheap. And if it gets lost in the shuffle, well you know, eternity is a long time to be laid out under the wrong epitaph.

I guess you could say I’m getting all my edits out of the way ahead well in advance.

So, what’s up with this change, anyway? Should the dust bunnies start quaking in their little dust bunny boots? Have I been struck by lightning and had my inner-slob fried to bits? Has hell frozen over?

Well, not exactly.

What’s happened is that I’ve discovered an exciting new application for the vacuum cleaner. And get this: It doesn’t involve hoovering up around the house!

Now you’re sitting up and listening, aren’t you?

What I’ve found is these bags for storing clothes. What you do is stuff all your clothes into one of these bags and then seal it up with a Ziploc-like tab.

Now you have a big monster bag that may as well be a dead body when you try to move it or store it. But it’s not the bag itself solves the problem. It’s the vacuum cleaner.

You see, the monster bag is air-tight so when you put the nozzle of the vacuum cleaner on the specially-designed insert on the bag, something magical begins to happen.

Your clothes shrink before your eyes. It’s true. I sat there and watched that monster bag-o-clothes compress and compress and compress until it was a quarter of its original size.

By the time it was finished the bag-o-clothes looked like a shrink-wrapped slab-o-frozen meat.

And as the bag shrank, my smile expanded. The possibilities are endless for things you may wish to shrink and store away: guest linens and pillows, towels, sleeping bags, beastly felines, children who behave badly. (Kidding about shrink-wrapping kids and cats, although there are moments when you’d like to.)

When you’re finished shrinking your stuff, you simply slide it under the bed or into the trunk. You can stand it up at the back of the closet or stuff it in a drawer.

Yes, a vacuum can be a beautiful thing, but shrink-wrappers beware because vacuums are not always your friend. Remember Newton what said? For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.

We can put this another way: for every vacuum, there is an equal and opposite leak waiting to happen.

I learned this lesson after retiring one of these shrink-wrapped bags to a drawer which was the correct size for the shrink-wrapped bag. Three days later, well, let’s just say there was skirmish involving a woman, a re-inflated shrink-wrapped bag-o-clothes and a drawer no longer big enough to accommodate its contents.

I’ll leave the rest to your imagination.

glethbridge@herald.ca