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| LISA |
Right now it seems like half my possessions are in the recycle bin out by the road, in an overflowing box in my office ready to go out to the recycle bin, in a trash can, in the living room of a local college student’s first apartment, or for sale at a local thrift store.
Going, going, gone
We plan to rent out the house while we’re traveling. That means our stuff will go into storage. A 10-by-20 storage facility costs $160 a month to rent. And it will probably go up every year. So do the math: If we are going to be gone 10 years, it will cost more than $20,000 to store our possessions. If a 10-by-25 costs 20% more per month, that’s $4,000 more to store our possessions.
Tens of thousands of dollars for stuff to sit in a dark, climate-controlled concrete cave for who knows how long.
So logically, of course, it makes sense to pare down, to take stock and keep only what we really need or want, and jettison the rest. It’s only stuff, right? We are going to learn to live without all these things around us and travel light for our adventurous life.
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| We made a lot of great memories in this pop-up |
We have entered the Purge Phase.
The trash men
I know the trash men really hate us. Our purging creates giant piles of trash every Friday morning. They’ve stopped bringing the trash can and recycle bins back up to the garage and are just dumping them sideways in the driveway now, clearly disgusted by our garbage excess.
Giving it away
A college student at CU Boulder moving into her first apartment now has one of our coffee tables. The Grove Sale, a huge annual church yard sale for charity, got the wood-and-tile table and chairs, extra performance bike, office chair and more. ARC, the Thrift Store on Colfax, is getting tons of clothes. A charity bookstore has been the grateful recipient of 15 boxes of books.
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| Sad to say goodbye to this Wurlitzer |
Next Door, Craigslist and Facebook Marketplace are my new best friends. Even a cat-clawed living room chair can find a grateful home if it’s free.
But oh, the pain
But when you’re getting rid of it, that’s when you realize how much meaning your stuff has, and how painful it can be to let it go.
Keeping: The gray cat mask Lexie made in art class in 4th grade. I can’t get rid of it, even though she thinks it’s really ugly. The bust Aryk crafted in art class in high school. The Boparder Hamm wine bottle from Germany.
Ditching: The arts and craft stuff. The giant L-shaped couch. The glass-topped dining room table from Bob’s life before me. The piano I bought from a pastor friend that used to live in a church I loved – pianos don’t keep well in storage. But damned if it doesn’t hurt to think of the hours our oldest child Aryk spent learning to sing while their teacher BJ played that piano in my living room.
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| But I will NOT miss this dining table! |
My youngest daughter Lexie is better at this purging stuff. She had a huge smile on her face as she filled five boxes with kid and young adult books for a local nonprofit bookstore’s donation pickup. Bob also shoves books aside with nary a sigh. But I stroke each one lovingly, reminisce about the feelings evoked by the story within, and then sadly place it into the recycling box.
Sigh
So the bookshelves are mostly bare. The travel maps and books from all the journeys I’ve taken, both with Bob and before Bob are gone. The articles I wrote for a church where I worked 10 years ago have been recycled. The popup where we camped as a family all over Colorado was sold to happy family who are ready to start their own camping traditions.
The good news is the regret is gone within a day, and now I feel lighter. And really, we are doing our kids a favor. They won’t have to sort through a lifetime worth of junk when we die, because we’ve done a lot of the work for them already. OK, it’s a morbid thought, but a practical one.
So purge on!
To be continued …
Posted by Lisa Hamm-Greenawalt
