Preserving Our Past For The Future

2016

Being in the junk business can be quite interesting. You meet lots of fun folks, see loads of uniquely cool items, and go places like muddy, rusty junkyards, underneath overgrown chimneys out in fields, and dilapidated barns to uncover the honey holes of junk. I love what I do, even if it can contribute to one of my biggest weaknesses….a tendency to hoard that junk.

I really, today anyway, am not all that big a hoarder. At least not as big as hoarder as most and not even as massive a hoarder as I used to be.  I have always placed large value on preserving the past, and would save things from destruction by purchasing or picking them up roadside even if I didn’t have an immediate use for them. I like to help others by giving away junk, and this was always my modis operandi, till I went into business and had to start selling it to make my living. Things have changed, due to the premium on space at my home and no storefront. Pretty much everything I now purchase at yard sales, find on the side of the road or dig for in those interesting barns goes into my storage units and everything has a price. And NOTHING is above getting sold.

It is that time of year when I am purging my booths, rearranging the existing storage units (four to be exact) and trying to eliminate one by the end of January at the latest. Since closing my shop in the summer and moving items to storage I have been selling a lot in various booths and online. But there are always those items, for whatever reason, that don’t turn right away and sit, and sit, and sit some more in storage. By the time they do sell, they are not worth anything because the initial value is gone, and the storage fees paid come off that bottom line. I abhor storage, always have, but it is a kind of necessity in my business right now. My job is to stay ahead of the game so the stuff doesn’t rule me, and rather I rule the stuff. Things were complicated a bit when my ideal number of  two 10 by 10 storage units swelled to an additional two units that are 10 by 20 due to the sudden closing of one of the stores where my booths were located. I had to shove it into storage just to vacate in awful, blistering weather during our Indian summer, and now I am dealing with it again in the extreme cold.

They are not fun, those two units.

I was watching the TV show Hoarders the other day. Being a professional organizer in my former life, I understand the psychological side of hoarding. The affected person has a deep seated need of some sort that  surfaces in the hoarding. It affects not only that person,  but also their family, their finances, friends, social life and even their spiritual life as they struggle to free themselves of the ties that bind them to their unnecessary possessions. A common thread that is voiced is “I can’t throw this out, SOMEONE might need it.”

Sometimes they are their own someone. Other times it is this faceless child or old person who cannot afford those headless dolls, moldy Tupperware pieces , defunct cell phones, or volumes of sports rackets that just need restringing to be good as new. In one episode I watched the other day, the psychologist pried opened a huge tote and found it was full of Chex mix. It had been stored over five years, the hoarder said, and she was saving it for “entertaining”. It was the leftovers of other parties she had hosted and she just kept dumping stuff in because, well…someone might need it…that someone being her.

After watching that episode, I was pretty reflective and have pondered a lot about the units I have. I think there are legitimate reasons for me to have those units in some cases, I do have to have backstock from my estate liquidations and have ongoing inventory to sell. But…is anyone REALLY going to want most of what is in those units? Highly unlikely, or if they do it will be a needle in a haystack finding the right buyer at the right time on most items. Just because it CAN sell sometime, doesn’t at all mean that it WILL.

And in all honesty, it is a LOT more fun buying something new and turning it right away because I purchased with someone directly in mind, instead of buying on a maybe or because it was cheap.

I also thought about how most of us hoard in intangible portions of our lives, too. We keep things in our minds that should have been thrown out long ago, things that are past their prime, no longer productive and in fact costing us dearly every single day. We hold grudges, we save words to be used in “that” conversation we want to have with our enemy, we have dark  thoughts  about our growing up, or we harbor ill toward a person who said a cross word to us on the wrong day in high school. We hold onto them for the same reason as the Chex Mix lady held onto her salty, stale snacks…someone might need it someday. And sadly, we are that someone.

It would be so much better to hold onto those things worth saving, rather than hold onto those things that weigh us down and make us sad. We don’t need those memories of the past, they only inhibit a beautifully sound future. And that is my plan for both my physical and my spiritual storage as 2016 comes to a close.

As I purge the storage units, I plan to hold things with light fingers. If it is not an object I can put right into a booth, or get photos of and list online, or list on ebay within the next month, then it is going right out to donation. Let someone else deal with it and find the right person to purchase.

And as I contend  with those old memories that want to suffocate and dampen my bright future, I plan to toss them into the old mental  Chex Mix tote, and then toss that sucker right out. I’d much rather spend my time saving things that are truly worth it to me. No more renting space in my mental attic to those things that are not making a contribution to my future.

And it won’t be that difficult, once I really get started with the ruthless toss task. I have always been a much better owner than renter anyway.

10941003_10153030026559407_8047608953381568968_n  It’s funny how traditions start in a family. I married in the summer of 1979 as a young girl of 19 to a slightly older man of 21. We lived in an apartment in Memphis near Graceland. The apartments were within walking distance of my parents’ home and also his, but we still felt pretty independent, although close enough to reach out for a Mommy hug if we ever needed one.

The upstairs apartment was considered large, for the day. There was a huge great room (wasn’t called that then, it was still called a living room), with a dining room large enough to seat 6 comfortably at the end of the long room. The kitchen was tiny but adequate and there were three bedrooms and  a bath and a half. There was a common complex washroom, which was not a great thing when you had to lug the laundry downstairs and over the hilly lawn. But during the heat of the summer, I could wash and dry clothes while lying by the pool just off the washroom, so it kind of balanced out. We couldn’t believe our first apartment, in a community mostly of old folks, was actually within the budget of two newlyweds living on a bakery clerk and grocery customer service guy’s salaries.

There was one thing we both hated about the apartment though…the stairs. It wasn’t bad enough to have to come up two flights at the front door. We were up THREE flights at the back since it was built into a hill and over a small storage area we shared with the other tenants of our particular building. If we wanted anything out of the storage or needed to take the trash out, it was down those three flights or we otherwise had to go way around the entire building, through a small alley, over a hill and to the back of the building.

Being young, we often chose the second path.

But there was one glorious thing about that back stairwell. It had a long, wide balcony at the top just off the kitchen door. From that balcony, I could see all the way to the Mississippi riverfront, many miles away. During the summer, I’d sit there while my husband worked the late shift, and watch the traffic amble by on Winchester Road.  On July Fourth we had a birds’ eye view of the fireworks display over the west end of the city from battered up webbed lawn chairs. In those days, at those times we loved those stairs that shoved the balcony way up high over our end of the city.

I spent a lot of time out back because of the view. I’d read Woman’s Day and Redbook magazines while supper cooked, or watch the apartment dwellers going in and out of the apartments I could see from our back door. When my husband would get ready to leave for work, he’d know he could find me there most of the time. He’d say goodbye, head down the front to the car, and drive around the building. Then he’d stop at the bottom of the back stairs, lean over to the passenger side of the car and look through that window up to where I was hanging over the banister waiting. I’d wave, he’d wave, then take off down the street…and that was the beginning of the tradition called “waving goodbye”.

Through the years, we always waved goodbye. Once my daughter was born, she joined me on that balcony when Daddy left, and we both waved. We moved from that apartment to our first home. It had a big front window, and Samantha was big enough to go to the window on her own, which she did, and she waved until Daddy (or me if gone to run errands) would clear out of her sight. When people visited, or grannies and granddads left, we all went out onto the porch, and we waved goodbye. Now that my child is grown and her little ones live with me, when I go to work, the littles let me know they will wave to me out the big arched window.  And I always look back, and I am never disappointed with an empty window.

I was reminded a few weeks ago about this tradition when I was leaving for errands. Only Lorelai was home with her Mom, the boys were at the sitter’s for the day. I got in the car, mission-minded, list in hand and started to pull back down the driveway. I caught something out of the corner of my eye. It was my sweet granddaughter, inside the garage doing her morning chores, but she had paused  to wave at me as I was leaving.  I stopped the garage door with the remote as it got halfway down and was going to raise it again so she could see me.  But quickly she leaned down, looked at me under the big steel door and flashed her hand in the “I love you” sign language, which changed into a furiously pumping goodbye wave. As I let the door go on down to the ground, I mused about how the times change, but this tradition stands.

December is a time to celebrate the birth of a Savior, someone who came to earth so we could say goodbye to unhappiness and fear, and say hello to a bright new future with Him, if we so choose. It is also a time of reflection and usually a time to wave goodbye to the year we have just flown through. This year is no different. I have said goodbye to customers who have passed away, friends also who have gone on. I took a partial retirement and waved goodbye mid-summer to my retail junk shop, and said goodbye to a profitable booth space in a nearby city when that thrift shop closed. I said a forced goodbye to a friend I had had for almost 15 years…still don’t know why that friendship went away, but it did, so I chose to just wave and go on down the street. Leaving something behind is the hardest part of waving goodbye.

I look forward to 2017 and hope it is a year of many new hello moments. It feels like it will be a year of promise,  potential, and peace just waiting for us to embrace it, and savor it. Wonder what is waiting just around the bend? I don’t know about you, but I am getting my hand ready to flash the “love” sign next December. Something tells me this is the year to add that to the goodbye tradition, no matter what the year does or doesn’t bring…even if it means we had to climb an extra flight of stairs to get through it.

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