“What Do You Do With All The Old Stuff?”

I’m on my fifth month of microscopic house cleaning.  And by that, I mean cleaning out my 1600 square foot house…. completely.  The job of building a new home over the course of two years means me, Gary (my partner) and Tucker, (my 13-year-old son) must take up temporary residence in a 1000 square foot apartment.So, there has been the move into the apartment and the move into the storage unit.  This requires incredible vision (on my part I might add) to look into our future – what do we need now and what can we live without for the next twenty-four months?  And what should be trashed, recycled, sold or donated?  How does one give up the ghosts?  It’s a task I wouldn’t wish upon my worst enemy (or maybe just the sort of thing I would).

The men in my life have no problem with this division of property.  They packed some stuff then said, “I don’t care what you do with everything else.  I’ve got what I need in this box.”

How can they be so cavalier towards their stuff?   How can they not look through every book and re-read paragraphs they had highlighted in yellow?  How can they not try on their clothes to see what no longer fits, what sort of fits and what might fit later on?  How can they not care about photographs, old magazines, letters received and sent (did they not make copies of the really good ones they wrote and mailed off)?

I tell myself it’s because they know I will keep their stuff for them (which I will).  But when faced with the reality of how quickly they went through their stuff and what little stuff they’re keeping (compared to my mountains of stuff), it really comes down to my own sentimentality about the stuff I own and my need to hang onto things that are archaic (a pink, plastic egg slicer my mother used 50 years ago), broken (a 1950’s mint porcelain Hamilton blender I made milkshakes in when I was 10), useless (a 1979 Boom Box) or just plain wrong (a black velvet, puffy sleeved, glitter-belted dress that dates back to my disastrous first marriage in the early 80’s).

“I am not a hoarder!” I screamed at my Gary after another Saturday of him watching me hold up hundreds of slides to the light from a job I did in 1995.  “These images may be important to my research on the book I might write someday!”  But, the H-word stuck and I eventually trashed hundreds of slides, contact sheets and duplicate prints.  He’s convinced I’m in need of his “tough love” and will no longer entertain my “Should I keep or give away?” dilemma.

My men abandoned me months ago.  They could no longer take seeing me spend my time (and theirs) holding up items like Hazel, a stuffed animal (which I have, of course, a photo of me cuddling when I was one) and asking them, “Should I keep her or give her away?”   Such things hold no interest for them.  And they want no part of this part of me.

I can’t blame them.  Each day I drive to my 1928 home, now falling apart both inside and out, and steel myself for the task ahead.  “Merideth, today is when you get it all done!” I confidently say.  Only to drive back to the apartment hours later, loathing myself for my continuing inability to move on with the move and just be done with it.

It all looked so innocent when I started the task LAST YEAR.  Keep a picture here, a chachka there.  And now with hindsight recognizing this lackadaisical approach to purging my stuff has resulted us in schlepping hundreds of boxes in dozens and dozens of carloads to the storage unit or back to our little apartment, where I tell everyone as they trip over them, “Don’t worry, I’ll just go through the boxes here.”

I’m all alone now.  The rainy season has begun.  Cold and dark settle in early ever since the electricity and water were turned off.  Even the house is letting me know it’s time to go — there’s no fixing the hole in the roof, washing away the mildew on the ceiling, repairing the broken windows or replacing doors that no longer close.  The house is shifting, the floorboards are coming up and I’m pretty sure the rats come in after I leave to seek shelter from the chilly nights.

She is sinking under the weight of the years she has lived.  As I am under the weight of the stuff I have collected and need to let go of.

I’d love to continue this story, but there is more stuff to go through.  My son says he doesn’t want his Skylander figurines, but what does he know?  I secretly box them up, so one day he can display them on his dorm room shelf where his friends will come by and say, “Boy, I wish my mom had kept mine!”