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We bought a new mattress recently and the effects of this otherwise modest decision, which continued for some days after our first restful night of slumber, reminded me of the vast difference between acquiring items and disposing of them.

Items enter our homes by their dozens over the years, as stealthy as cats, but once ensconced they’re as stubborn as soap scum on the walls of a bathtub.

(Or, worse still, the remnants of Frosted Flakes and milk left to congeal in a bowl overnight. You can’t dislodge that stuff with a howitzer.)

My wife, Lisa, had no trouble obtaining the new mattress.

Generally speaking, if you have a credit card with a spending limit that hasn’t been stretched until it’s close to snapping, there are companies willing to send just about anything to your house and leave the package propped against the most accessible door.

So it was with the mattress.

It was the first one of my acquaintance, however, that arrived not fully fleshed but shrunken, rather like dehydrated, freeze-dried food that I stuff into my backpack for hiking trips.

Except to get the full utility of this mattress you add not water but air.

Lisa chose a foam mattress because it’s supposed to be a bit firmer than the pillow top model it replaced. She explained, citing certain informants whose credibility I am in no position to question, that ill-tempered vertebrae, which hers sometimes are, prefer to recline on a less-compliant surface than the typical mattress offers.

This seemed to me contradictory.

I always figured that you’re more likely to foul up your back by slamming it into a brick wall rather than a pillow. But I know so little of our spinal area that when I hear the term “slipped disk” I can only think of dropping a Frisbee.

This foam mattress was rolled up and stuffed into a cardboard box. We coaxed it out, which was slightly easier than slipping a sausage out of its casing but much less greasy, unrolled it and laid it atop the box spring.

The mattress at this point was about as thick as what you’d expect to find slung over a metal cot in a prisoner of war camp.

But Lisa assured me that, like bread dough left in a warm oven, the mattress would plump up, and within a day or two fatten up to its fully advertised one foot.

It didn’t take that long.

As air rushed in to fill the spaces in the foam — or at least that’s the process I envisioned; I know as much about physics as I do about backbones — the mattress thickened at a rate that I fancied I could detect by craning over and squinting at it. By bedtime, several hours after it was first exposed, the mattress was about 10 inches tall and ready for its debut.

This was both gratifying and entertaining.

So all was well.

At least in that room.

On the other side of the house, however, a goodly portion of the floor space in our living room was no longer floor space.

This is where the old queen-size mattress came to rest.

This wasn’t exactly an optimal place to put the thing, but in a house that covers about 1,400 square feet, we didn’t have a better option.

I wanted to lug the mattress out to the street and tape a “free” sign to it — at least I wouldn’t have to look at it, or trip over it in the dark (at least the landing would be soft) — but Lisa wouldn’t hear of it.

The mattress, of course, is only one example of how difficult it can be to rid ourselves of possessions once they have crossed the threshold.

A mattress just happens to be a particularly treacherous example of the general phenomenon, being both larger and heavier than most other things that we accumulate.

My back rarely gives even a slight twinge, but I feared for its future while we were grappling with the old mattress. Few items can combine heft, an ungainly shape and the tendency to twist, like a snake trying to escape your grasp, as effectively, which is to say infuriatingly, as a mattress.

If we had opted for a king-size when we bought the mattress 16 years ago I suspect I would know more intimately what a slipped disk is.

And what it feels like when it’s slipped.

We had hoped to donate the mattress, but none of the potential destinations we looked into was interested.

So we ended up tossing it into the back of my father-in-law’s pickup truck and hauling it to the dump.

And by tossing I mean fumbling with it and nearly dropping it three times and generally scrambling around in the driveway. This is what typically happens when a pickup is parked in the driveway, prepared to make a dump run.

We’re back to our normal contingent of mattresses, which is a relief.

But in the process of swapping I unearthed a few items from under the bed frame that, based on their manes of dust, had been lurking there since the Clinton administration.

Now I have an old T-shirt and a tennis racket cover to deal with.

Neither is so physically taxing as a mattress, to be sure.

But it still annoys me that I let these inanimate objects, which are incapable of moving on their own, get past my defenses and take root, like a besieging army gradually amassing in nooks and crannies I rarely think about or see.

Jayson Jacoby is editor of the Baker City Herald.