Sell it!
June 4th, 2007
I spent the better part of a gorgeous, sunny weekend in the back of my childhood closet and in the bowels of my parents’ basement in New Jersey. My mother, sister and I pulled a clean sweep to find junky treasures to sell for the fund at a huge, annual tag sale on the grounds of Rutgers University next weekend. We did a pretty good job of rummaging through years of dusty, forgotten items without veering off track and onto memory lane.
Alas, we’ve done this sorting drill so many times over the years.
My mother mounted regular garage sales in her day, so a good chunk of my youth was spent boxing and lugging our family wares up the basement stairs and onto our driveway. I was positively mortified at the time. (Though, just about anything is cause for mortification when you’re 12). Turning our front yard into an open flea market? Hawking our personal belongings for a few extra bucks? What would people think? I worried. (Little did I know they were probably thinking, We need to have one of these at our house. We’ve got a ton of stuff to get rid of).
So I kept my role in these two-day affairs to setup and cleanup. I hid in the house at the first sight of a bargain-hunter trudging up the drive. Besides, I couldn’t stomach watching perfect strangers pick so clinically through the items and questionable purchases of our lives.
It was all rather amusing in hindsight. My sister routinely let people walk off our property carrying items she let them have for free. “It’s good karma,” was her thinking, even a young thing back then. But her creation of the “karma box” — items people could take for free — signaled the good will giving had officially gotten out of hand. My mother came into the house to report my sister had just given away a set of folding meal trays we bought on vacation at Disney’s Magic Kingdom. It was time to stop the karma. Still on my self-imposed exile from the driveway, I dashed this scolding missive in pencil on the garage wall. (It’s still up there today). Note to Donna: No more free Magic Kingdom Trays! Must Pay 50 cents! She met us half-way. The karma box stayed, but she ceased the willynilly free-for-all.
But here’s the curious thing. Despite having a garage sale nearly every summer for a string of years, we still ended up with a basement stocked with plenty of “merchandise” for yet another one the following year. Our own Greek tragedy, doomed to a life of bottomless yard sale boxes. How could this be? Looking back, I see it was because my mother (and even her two daughters, at times) could never part with the old stuff that carried so many memories, or the newer stuff that held so much promise.
But this time around, we were all much freer in the letting go. The forgotten baubles and bits we might have clung to years before? “Sell it!” was our mantra this weekend. The motivation is certainly the fundraiser. But I think this has also inspired the idea of living simpler. Once you start going through your stuff, especially for the purpose of helping people without much stuff, you can’t help but be struck by the ridiculousness of it all. You realize how much excess there is in our culture, yet how much we’re encouraged to keep filling our lives up with still more stuff. But none of it really makes us any happier, does it? So finally getting rid of it is as much a score for the fund as it is for creating more space – physically and energetically – in our lives.
I’m hoping that anyone who donates will feel liberated in the same way.
