Not for Sale in Braintree:
Three Story Locker Room, Well Equipped

My home over the years has gradually turned into a locker room. Baseball and softball players around the world, regardless of level of play, would feel right at home at my house.

We have an assortment of T-balls, those soft balls that 5 & 6 year olds learn how to throw with back from the days when my oldest daughter started playing, oh, so many years ago. Our youngest child is now 16, and the daughters are even older and have left home, but the T-balls remain.

We also have a huge assortment of old softballs and baseballs. You’d expect to find the baseballs in our son’s room, after all he still plays baseball, but we find them in odd spots. The dogs drag in old falling apart balls they find in our woods, with the covers falling off and a weird looking round hairy object inside that is barely recognizable.

I found a softball recently in a box with the kind of thread that you tie quilts with. No idea how that got there!

We find baseballs under the couch months after the season is over, in the hallways and sometimes in the bathroom hamper, as if someone thought that was a handy place to store stuff when asked to pick up his bedroom. We have buckets of balls in the cellar, on the main floor and in the attic. I even have a box of balls under the back seat in my van.

We also have an eclectic collection of catcher’s equipment. We have shin guards that will fit any child from eight to full-grown adult. Or shin guard. We rarely can find both of a set of two. It’s as if one just got up and wandered away and we decided to hold onto the other mate, hoping the lost one would reappear after its mysterious journey to the land of lost equipment.

We have quite a few chest guards as well—except they are missing pieces. Some have one strap, some none. Some chest guards are ripped and in such bad shape they should have been thrown away years ago. But my husband hates to throw anything away and is sure that with a few new pieces and some duct tape these chest protectors would be as good as new. After all we are Vermonters and Scottish as well and among other things, this means we never throw anything away. We just store it on the off chance that a used chest protector could some day save the planet, and that we’ll be ready.

Our attic is full of old army bags full of "perfectly good" wooden bats. Except nobody uses wooden bats any more. Not at any level that we might need to provide a team with bats for.

But they are in good shape, and at least wooden bats can be used for other things. Our daughters could have all carried one off to college to keep in their cars for defense against a car jacking. They didn’t, but they could have.

We could keep one next to the front door in case of an intruder, to protect home and hearth. We don’t, and by the time one of us has gotten into the crawl space and unearthed the bats from all the other used equipment, an intruder would have had plenty of time to steal all the good silver. But they could be used for that, so of course we can’t possibly throw them away!

Our biggest collection is of old scorebooks. My husband and I have every scorebook from every team and every season we ever coached. Between the two of us, that’s a lot of scorebooks. We have scorebooks back from 1979 when my husband first started coaching, long before I knew him. These scorebooks have been moved from house to house and have been added to every year. I have coached for 19 years and he has coached off and on for 26 years. You do the math!

Then there is the miscellaneous equipment. First aid kits, jocks, ace bandages, heating pads, ice packs, Bengay, cleats, catcher’s mitts. Some mitts resemble pancakes they’ve been folded in one position for so long. And I don’t even want to think of the partial uniforms stuffed at the bottom of everyone’s closets. The list is endless, and somehow comforting. Like if we keep the equipment around and on hand, spring is sure to come every year, no matter how snowy or cold or dark the weather is now.

Jill Montgomery and her family live in Braintree where they are equipped to hit the ball fields at the first sign of spring.

By Jill D. Montgomery