Hoeing Out

We’d talked about getting a dumpster and hoeing out the house for years. But in April we finally ponied up the money and did it.

This move was hastened by the decision that our delapidated old garage was on its last leg, the other leg being completely fucked a long time ago. Now each heavy snowfall had us wondering, “Is this it? Is it caving in?” Now partly that was wishful thinking in the hopes that if it did cave in, insurance would be paying for a new one. It was also said partly in the fear that one of us, generally me, would be inside when what little still held the building intact finally decided it’d had enough. So the can we’d been kicking down the road until next year stopped this year and we decided to replace it. 

( As an aside, when the contractor came to tear down the garage, I was at work. I arrived a short time after they’d started and it was already on the ground. The first words ou tof his mouth were, “When you were working in there, were you ever nervous?” As it turns out, the structure was far less stable than we’d realized. It took two passes with the grapple attachment, or whatever the hell you call the grabby thing, for the whole thing to fall down. ) 

And so it was that, in order to save myself countless trips to the landfill disposing of twenty five years worth of “I’ll use that someday,” we rented a dumpster. This would coincide with a massive clean out of our house, which not only contained the aforementioned quarter century of our own stuff, but also the stuff left behind by the previous inhabitants of our home. Or as the late, great George Carlin would say, “…someone else’s shit.”

Going through everyone else’s shit, along with my own stuff in the garage and attached workshop ( where the hell did a bowling ball come from?!? ) wasn’t difficult. My “keep or dispose of” litmus test was, if I hadn’t used something in five or more years, or I didn’t even know it existed, it went bye-bye.

After several hours, the garage portion of the clean out was complete and I was a little concerned that I’d ordered too large a dumpster. 

That was before we started on the house. We began in the basement, which was an undertaking to say the least, but the end result left me a very happy man. It was the cleanest it’s ever been and well organized. Then over the next several days, we continued through every room and closet. Numerous boxes and countless contractor grade garbage bags were filled and taken either to the dumpster or to my truck to go to the Salvation Army. Both filled quickly, the latter requiring at least four trips to town to drop off clothes, books, toys and whatever else didn’t make the cut but also seemed like it could benefit someone else.  

A few times we found items that, in the past, I’d searched high and low for before deciding they were stolen by the crackhead mother/daughter duo who broke into our home in 2016. But lo and behold, there they were, put away for safe-keeping, even from myself. 

The act of sorting through our belongings and discarding what we no longer wanted or needed began to feel kinda cathartic. Sorting through physical objects and deciding what to hold on to or let go of felt like a metaphor ( or would it be a simile… I never know for sure ) for what I’d already been doing with other aspects of my life. As such, it wasn’t always easy. Some boxes contained mementos of specific events or times in my life, stages of growth or self-discovery that led to where I am today. Others were souvenirs from trips somewhere or sentimental keepsakes, their meaning known to only me. Old broken toys, pictures, concert tickets, high school yearbooks… I paused to pore over them and the memories attached to them, but in the end very little of it was rescued from the coming trip to the landfill. My thinking was, since I hadn’t given them much consideration in decades, there was little sense in keeping them now.

So it was that after a week and nearly giving myself a hernia carying an old toilet and sink down from the attic ( seriously… it doubled as a water closet for someone who lived here decades before us ) the time came for the dumpster to be picked up. And we had actually filled it. Our house had been thoroughly gone through and literal tons of unwanted items removed.

As I watched the dumpster being loaded on to the truck and covered, for the briefest moment I felt a pang of regret about some of the things I’d thrown on there. Was I perhaps too hasty in getting rid of some of those keepsakes that had been with me for so long already? Surely it wouldn’t have hurt anything to return them to a remote corner of the attic for a little longer? Perhaps not, and for the briefest moment I had second thoughts. Which was completely irrational of course, it was too late for that now. Instead I stood in the window and watched as they finished loading the dumpster on the truck. 

I went to a different window and continued watching as the truck left our driveway. It started down the road, carrying with it not only a lifetime of memories, but also any regrets I had left. And as it disappeared from sight, I let it all go, just as I’d done with so much in my life already, and moved on. 

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