ONE OF THE MORE intriguing aspects of life in the countryside, I've discovered in my early days of trying to get my hands around its throat, is waking up each morning to an ever-changing silhouette of Manhattan's skyline stretched across my bedroom.

One morning, I'm treated to a view of what looks strikingly like the twin towers of the World Trade Center. The next, it could be the Empire State Building, if my wife Elizabeth has found a particularly ugly lamp to plonk down on the top box.

That's what we are talking about here - boxes, stacks and stacks of boxes, several million of them, or at least 87, and they have turned the interior of our cottage into a cardboard city whose outline varies with the number of garbage bags we manage to fill on any given day.

This is what comes of moving home and deciding your new abode absolutely cannot do without that bit of fake Egyptian papyrus, the TV set with the two-inch screen that died five years ago, the balalaika with one string, or several tons of other memorabilia dating back to the dying days of the Eisenhower administration.

"Where did it all come from?" moans Elizabeth as she drops the plastic Webb family crest and the last of 19 Monopoly sets into a big black bag. "Better question," says I, "is where is it all going?"

There is a simple answer to that, one that should have occurred to us - but didn't - when we decided in late 2000 to up stakes in London and move lock, stock and three cats to our cottage in a small village about 70 miles up the highway: It goes out the door, out of sight and out of our life.

But there's the rub - how do you decide what to get rid of and what to keep? Okay, so that Tom Lehrer 33 1/3 RPM looks and even sounds a bit like the cat practiced jump-starts for the 100-yard dash on it, but how can you give up his songs, the ones you sang when North Carolina beat Kansas for the NCAA basketball championship in 1957?

Or the push-button radio that hasn't really worked since the day you threw it at the customs idiot at the airport in Baghdad back in '82? "Oh, by all means take it along and stick it back in the closet for another five years or so," Elizabeth says. "Maybe it'll heal itself."

Sarcasm really isn't becoming in a lady who makes such great egg mayonnaise sandwiches and knows how to get a ping pong ball-sized pill down Currant Bun the cat's throat.

Be that as it may, her essential point was taken. It just wasn't taken far enough. The fact remained that we had an apartmentful of furniture and other essential debris in London and a cottageful of ditto in a village an hour's drive up the highway.

In its most elemental form, the problem was one of trying to cram 10 pounds of cat doo-doo into a five-pound cat doo-doo jar. Something had to give, and in our case it consisted of, among other things, two-thirds of a living room suite, three wardrobes, 42 years' worth of paid bills, three cat trays and my entire collection of Stephen King novels.

In all, 57 black bag loads of junk went out the door in London and never even made it to the semi-finals of house moving - getting onto the furniture van itself.

It wasn't nearly enough, by several country miles.

The moving van stopped squarely in the middle of our village lane, and the three lads began shifting the load into the cottage. Hours and tea breaks came and went, and so did the boxes. They mounted, one atop another, in row after row, in the garden room and the living room and the kitchen and the bedroom and the bathroom and the office.

Just as I began pondering which would end first, the flood of boxes or the universe as we know it, one of the movers peeked around the corner. "Almost there," he announced with a tea-stained grin. "Only 40 more to go . . ."

That's the sort of humor they should bring back hanging for.

When they finally finished, there sat Elizabeth and I and Currant Bun and the other two cats, Ali Magraw and Teddy Bear - and, of course, 87 boxes, reducing visibility in all directions to about three feet seven inches.

There was a knock on the front door. It was another deliveryman. "Where do we put it, squire?" he inquired, waving a casual hand at the new white couch I had ordered six months earlier and totally forgotten about.

That was nearly two months ago. Since then, the careful sorting of goods to keep or toss has been replaced by a wholesale piling of dishes, pots, pans, pillows, silverware, books, bathroom racks, leftover bits of carpet, 13-year-old Christmas tree lights, flower vases, wires and electrical plugs, four calling birds, three French hens, two turtles doves and a partridge in a pear tree into more black bags and hauling them down to the local dump.

In all, about 60 bags' worth has been deported as our soft hearts harden in the quest for survival, or at least a chance for a peek out the windows. But still dotted around the cottage in varying, Manhattan skyline levels are another 25 boxes on which to crack shins, stub toes and direct a soul-cleansing rage of four- and 12-letter epithets.

These are mostly books - encyclopedias, almanacs and my Bill Bryson collection - that have survived the culling process. So far.

They are awaiting the arrival of the carpenters and the bookcases and shelves they have promised to build. Someday. Any day now.

This is another fascinating aspect of country life - the concept of keeping time and schedules, or the lack thereof. For carpenters and their ilk, this depends on the number of tea breaks per morning, the state of the weather (anything less than Sahara-like sunshine is dodgy) and how many times they have to go to retrieve tools they've forgotten to bring along.

This means, by my reckoning, the last of the boxes should vanish on either February 27, or two days before next Christmas Eve, or June 28, 2004.

Maybe if we put this awful ornament on top of that pile of boxes, we could get sort of a Chrysler Building effect.

Thought for the Week: If we aren't supposed to eat animals, why are they made of meat?

"Notes From A Tangled Webb" is syndicated by: