We got too. much. junk. So I decided we would have a garage sale. I was kind of halfhearted about it until I mentioned I might have one to my good friend, Sue. Sue has been wanting to have a yard sale for a long time. She jumped on board immediately, and I had no choice but to get my act in gear and follow through on my plan. So I started kind of going through stuff and taking a few things out to the garage, where this sale is supposed to happen on Friday and Saturday. But once I got moving, I finally got motivated to make. this. happen.
The Junk. It has been accumulating for years. In the not too distant past, we had a full house of seven people, three dogs, two cats. We have a four bedroom house and the aforementioned garage. Everybody, including the cats and dogs came with stuff. In time the kids have almost all moved out. We have one at home, now, and just one dog. But when the kids all left, they left stuff. The front room became the depository for all the stuff. It is a stuff room. I want it to be a guest room. With no stuff in it. I probably should have had a garage sale a long time ago. I talked about it. I just never did it. And then the Mr. became ill and everything was off the table. For the last two years all my energy has been spent on getting the Mr. better. But now I need to start divesting myself of stuff. Because I am running out of room in this house. Literally tripping over stuff. I bought some new wooden serving trays the other day to make it easier to carry food up and down the stairs (because we don't eat at the table like normal people unless it's a special occasion. We eat in our bedroom). I had set them on the counter. Ally came in and wanted to cook. She needed the counter space, so she set them on the floor. The Mr, who rarely comes into the kitchen, spending most of his time upstairs, came down and didn't see them and tripped. Poor man broke his toe. The next day I had some people come out to do some plumbing and I piled a bunch of project stuff I am working on in the laundry room floor, right on top of the crawl space access. The only crawl space access, I might add. Of course the first thing they asked was where the crawl space was, so I had to move it all out of the laundry room so they could get under the house. It was a bit embarrassing. The laundry room is crammed full of stuff that has nowhere else to go. Our tornado hiding place under the stairs is jam packed with stuff, and if we have a tornado, I guess we will be just plum out of luck.
There are few things that give me more anxiety than stuff. I realized it a few years ago. I may have a little bit of PTSD leftover from my junior year of high school. My family and I lived in a house in Sherman, Texas It was March 29, 1985. The landlord, who was a local hot shot lawyer who owned half the town sent my mom an eviction notice. We had thirty days to move. Only he didn't wait thirty days for us to go. Four days after the notice I got called out of Mrs. Wilson's English class into the hallway. A teacher told me I needed to go home, because someone had reported that there were people at our house, in our house, throwing everything we owned out into the front yard and out the second story windows. I called my mom. She came to get me and we drove home. And it was unbelievable. Like something you see on TV. Men were throwing things out the windows. Hurricane lamps that had belonged to my great grandmother. clothes. My records were in the middle of the heap. The fridge and piano, just rolled out to the curb. And the men were laughing at us. That was the worst part, I think. We stayed up all night trying to salvage our stuff, in the rain. The best part about that whole night was watching God in action our our behalf. Mom was gone, dropping off a truckload of our stuff at a new place. My sister and I were huddling together on the porch alcove with my aunt who had begun to pray. Jesus, will you stop the rain, so we can save this stuff. To my amazement, the rain stopped. A few minutes later it began to rain again, and again she prayed. Again, the rain, to my astonishment, stopped. A few hours later it began to really rain. She prayed and nothing happened. But, we realized it was fine, because everything that was left was covered in plastic, now. It took us all night, but we saved our stuff.
But now, grown up, I have these anxiety issues. I find myself in a struggle, caught between the emotional and the logical. The logical says that stove in my shed, the really cool one, a retro throwback to the fifties that belonged to my great grandmother, really needs another home. The emotional says But that was Grandma's. It's sacred. The logical says But it's taking up half the shed, space you could be using for the project stuff that is currently on the laundry room floor, sitting on top of the crawl space. The emotional says But it's was Grandma's. It's sacred. Maybe someday I can use it. Even though it's gas and I only have electric. The logical says let it go. The emotional says But it was Grandma's. Let it stay.
I called my Mom today to talk about Grandma's stove. So. much. guilt. at the thought of selling it. Because it was Grandma's. She told me I should see if any family members want it, and if not, I should sell it. After I got off the phone, the logical side of me breathed a sigh of relief, because I don't really know what to do with the stove. I only took it because it was Grandma's. The emotional side of me cried real tears at the thought of giving it up. I feel like I am betraying her in some way. The only conclusion that I can come to is that I must be a NUT to let stuff like this cause me so much angst. But in the end I have actually decided to side with the logical and let it go.
The other thing that I have major anxiety over is cleaning. Cleaning gives me much more anxiety than stuff. But I think they are both related. I once read a book called The Book of Waking Up, by Seth Haines. The book was all about the many form of addiction. In his case, it was alcoholism. Some people are addicted to drugs. Some people to sex, some to shopping, some to television. Some to Amazon. Some to Netflix. In each case, he says, the addiction is related to pain and the addiction itself is an avoidance of facing that pain. He asks What makes you cry in front of your kids? I thought about this deeply. And the answer came. Cleaning. Cleaning?? Yes, Cleaning makes me cry in front of my kids. Cleaning has always been a major point of anxiety for me. Why is that? If it's true that there is a source of pain there, and I could trace it back to that point...Well let's just say that my house growing up was not the cleanest house on the block. When I had kids I swore I wouldn't live like that, and it became an obsession, almost. And THAT'S where the pain is. I don't want to live like I did as a kid. It was painful. So when STUFF is out of place in my house, or when there is too much of it and it is cluttering up my life, it makes me crazy. And I cry in front of my kids. Well, I used to cry in front of them, not so much now that they are grown and gone. And rage. I made them crazy with my craziness!
So. much. anxiety. over stuff. Not helped by the opening of the new Amazon dump store a few months ago. So much fun shopping there! So many great deals on stuff we don't need. It's addictive. And they they have these Mystery Boxes you can buy for fifty or a hundred bucks. You don't know what you are getting, but you might get lucky and find something worth having that you didn't know you needed.
My husband was, to my dismay, very attracted to these Mystery boxes. He bought three or four. The first one had some interesting stuff. A couple of carburetors, some kits to teach teenagers about electricity. Those looked cool. A bunch of party stuff. You know, like, little signs you put on the cake that say Happy 53rd birthday, I think maybe a computer keyboard, and I don't remember what else. The second box was full of shoes. All different kinds of shoes. Boots, slippers, tennis shoes... and some Halloween stuff. I was not impressed.
We gave much of it away. But still, the rest of it sat in the office, on the floor, in boxes for several months. One day I walked in and looked at the pile of cake stands, that I had no place for, a video game joystick, an air bubbler for an aquarium, the electricity kits, the carburetors, the shoes, and I had enough. The stuff had. to. go.
But it didn't go, it just moved, down to the stuff room. Until this week. The straw that actually broke the camel's back and finally forced my garage sale hand was small. It was a tea canister. The tea we drink comes in a metal canister. Too pretty to throw away. So we have been accumulating tea canisters for a couple of years, off and on. We now have about fifteen tea canisters. I have recycled, reused, rehomed them in every way I can think of yet still they come. They are everywhere. The answer, of course is to get a different kind of tea, but we really, really like that tea. I tried to throw them out. The Mr. caught them on the way out the door and brought them back, again, much to my dismay.
So today I really started working on this garage sale project. I brought a bunch of things to the garage, to add to Sue's growing garage sale collection. I spent a few minutes with my steam cleaner and an area rug that was waiting on the garage floor for me to clean it. Mid October and it's as hot in Texas still as most summers everywhere else. Almost 90 degrees and I was wearing sweatpants and definitely sweating. Hot and tired from hauling stuff from house to garage. Trying to do three things at once, clean the rug, lop some limbs that were hanging over the garage door, and doggy poop patrol. My knees were killing me. I was getting a little grumpy. The Mr. was needing me and I was trying to help him, while trying to do the three other things, plus I knew there was still a boatload of stuff that needed to be carted out to the garage. And the smoker needed cleaning. The Mr. had decided to sell it, but I would have to clean it. And the fridge, the hated black Maytag needed cleaning, so I could finally get it OUT of my mudroom. I had high hopes that someone would buy it, despite it's little ice problem.
I finally got all that done and came inside to haul out those Amazon boxes. I brought the handcart and loaded it up high, with one of those little electricity kits sitting on top, a plastic toolbox full of all kinds of gizmos and gadgets sure to make any teenager forget about playing with their Switch for a while. (sarcasm, Ha!) I carefully levered the wheels of the handcart down the steps into the sunken living room which I had to go through to get to the garage. BAM everything fell off. Tea tins flying everywhere. I may have said some mildly caustic words as I stopped and piled it all back on. Then negotiated the steps back up out of the sunken living room and around the corner to the back door. Door open, no problem. Cart through the door, no problem. Two steps out and EVERYTHING FELL OFF AGAIN. Only this time, the little plastic kit hit the deck and a million little gadgets that could have entertained a million teenagers went everywhere. I might have lost my mind a little. The Mr. came out and I got down and picked all of it up and tossed it back in the plastic kit it came in. He took it all inside and carefully reassembled the whole deal, making sure every little piece was in the right place. I finished hauling the boxes outside and came back in. He was sitting at the table with the finished kit. I was tired, and dirty, and sweaty, and it was right as I was walking past him, that I saw something that just arrested me. I stopped my yapping. I remembered again why I love this old house so much. Peace returned. I forgot about how tired and sweaty I was. I marveled that God knew exactly what it would take to get me to just stop and let the anxieties and petty irritations fall away. The late evening light was coming into the house through the south windows and falling onto the walnut of the piano, and the pale green wall of the dining room. It was breathtaking. The movement of the trees outside the window playing tag with shadow and light in the last hours of the day and putting on a show for anyone who took time to watch and see. It was the same feeling I get in the morning, sometimes, in my bedroom watching the prisms as they cross my yellow wall, reflections of the rising sun on the glass knobs and old mirror on the closet door. The same feeling I get when I wake early and see the first rays of the sun through the front door glass and making wavy glass patterns on the stairway wall. Makes me thankful to have had the privilege of living here, despite any troubles we may have had along the way. And that is a might good way to end the day.
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