The task in front of me is huge. It involves hauling, heaving, unpacking, saving, chucking, selling and recycling memorabilia from the first 40 years of a life. It just not my life.
There are over 300 boxes in the leaky barn, of books, GI Joe action figures, cassettes, LPs, VHS and Beta tapes. Not to mention furniture, animal crates, and anything else you can think of to fill a modest-sized home with a big playroom.
This is a case of offering a space for storage gone awry.
After 20 years, the time had come to clear the stuff out before the barn fell in on itself.
On the first morning, my siblings, Dee and Chad, came down to help. That was fortunate because my brain had gone into self-preservation mode. I became catatonic.
Dee, aptly nicknamed the General, took charge and Chad kept his cursing to a minimum. They kept my legs and arms moving, as my mind refused to participate.
After 3 hours of lugging mouse shit covered boxes, down steep rickety stairs, and eventually just hoisting them off the second story loft, we called it a day.
I walked back to the house with a bag of foreign money, a jar of rocks, a package of green pushpins, and 12 books of erotica.
I picked the sex books and pins because…who wouldn’t.
The colorful, smooth pebbles were satisfying to see and hold.They must have been mementoes from travels and adventures around the world. I used to do the same until I pointed out a rock shaped like the state of Vermont and my husband Peter called it a Leaverite, as in “leave her right there”.
A bag of money is a hard temptation to pass up, even if it’s all pre-Euro and worthless.
However, I did find $3.60 in quarters, nickels, dimes and pennies.
All but the cold hard cash and the push pins are going back to the barn, but not for a while. At the moment, putting something back in the barn, even though it’s been there with generations of mice for 2 decades, feels counterproductive.
In order to maintain some sort of equilibrium, nothing more goes in, until what needs to be out stays out.
There’s a life lesson here but I have misplaced it.
Alexandra Langstaff 