I’m going to go out and do fun spring stuff for a while!
Okay, not really. But my daughter delayed her garage sale until Kendallville’s city-wide sale, May 22-24. For the uninitiated, this is when everyone in the entire town tries to sell their old stuff at the same time, while hordes of junk-seekers from other town pour in to increase their own supply of junk, so they can have a garage sale. For a weekend it looks like Sarajevo during their civil war.
Perhaps ironically, no one has ever bought a garage at a garage sale.
I’ll take the opportunity to go through the whole house for anything decent enough to sell that I haven’t touched in recent years. If it’s not decent—trash. There’s a lot of it. (My new books will also be for sale at her sale—not quite a book signing, as I’ll only be there part of the time. Kind of a stealth book signing.)
Going through so much stuff confirmed what I already knew: I have too much stuff. Isn’t that something? I live in a house that was built in 1879 with almost no storage space. No one saw the sense in keeping anything you didn’t use regularly. Today people rent storage units, because they’ve run out of space in their homes for stuff they use so seldom that they forget they have it. It’s just a little silly.
So, I have pledged to get rid of my stuff. Well, some of it. I’m un-junking, de-hoarding, messing with my mess, Avengers de-assembling. (Oh, and I’m going to see The Avengers, too.) I’m even getting rid of some of my books. No, really. I’ll cry a little, but I’ll get over it.
So I’ll be around, but not as much until my de-stuffing stuff and home maintenance things are done. I suppose I’ll get a column out of it. Meanwhile, I can only hope my fans, friends, and innocent bystanders spread the word about my books–the ones I wrote, I mean–while I’m not promoting. That way, if I sell a lot …
I can buy more stuff.
Maybe junk is like helium, and there is only so much of it in the world. So we have to keep moving it from house to house. Someday, like floaty balloons, we will miss our junk when it is all gone.
Oh, the fruitcake theory of passing on objects!
I’ll definitely miss the junk … especially those handful of items I’ll desperately need, even though I never used them for ten years before throwing them away.
I like the idea of everyone selling stuff at the same time. Maybe they could put it against the clock a la speed dating style and see if that sells some of the crap faster.
That’s not too dissimilar to the way everyone goes out and tries to jump on the good deals at 9:01 that first morning.
And so, the great circle of junk continues. 🙂
Oh, that sounds like a great Disney song:
“It’s the ciiiirrrrrccccllllee of juuuunnnnkkkkkk …. and it buries people … under piles of crap ….