“Excuse me,” I called to the white-haired woman who had cooed over Maisie’s “sweet little face” a few minutes before, saying it was fine to bring her inside. “Are there any more lights back here? I’d like to get a better look at this love seat.”
“Well, let me see,” she said, making her way toward me, navigating a labyrinth of old upright vacuums, dressers with missing handles, and children’s toys. “I only just started volunteering, so I’m not sure where everything . . . Oh, wait. Here’s a switch.”
The room flooded with fluorescent light, harsh but bright. I thumped my palm against the armrest. The love seat coughed up a cloud of dust. It was dirty, no question, and those ball feet were absurd, but the velvet upholstery was untouched by moths and was a surprisingly beautiful sapphire blue.
“How much is it?” I asked.
“Well, let me see,” she said again, craning her neck up, down, and sideways, searching for a price tag, finding none. “My goodness, I really don’t know. But I think they’d be glad to let it go, it takes up so much space. Let me think . . .” She did for a full minute, then cautiously asked, “Would fifty dollars be too much?”
In the end, I paid $122.50. But for that price I got the love seat, a chair with a cushion and a curved wicker back, a generic floor lamp, a bedframe with a fake brass headboard, some battered floating shelves, a small pine desk, and an eight-place setting box of dinnerware that was missing only two salad plates. The dishes were so cute and cheery—raspberry pink with turquoise circles and a band of white dots along the edge.
The woman agreed to hold everything for a few days, so I’d have time to unpack more boxes, and called the church secretary, who called the youth group leader, who arranged for a pickup truck to deliver everything I’d bought.
It started so simply, with a half-hidden glimpse of velvet, blue bright and brilliant, that roused my craving for color and need to nest, hungers long silenced by the urgency of caregiving and the single-minded focus on simple survival.
When I got back to the condo, I tore into the boxes, sorting and stacking the contents, figuring out what to toss, what to keep, and where it all should go.
Some choices were easy.
Opening the door to my closet, I spread my arms as wide as I could, corralled every item in my black-gray-charcoal-brown-navy work wardrobe, and stuffed them all in the trunk of my car, along with every pair of toe-pinching pumps, before depositing them at the drive-through donation center of the nearest Goodwill store. When I opened a big plastic bin with yard after yard after yard of bright cotton dress goods, fabrics I’d bought on sale and stowed away, and then found the box containing my sewing machine, notions, scissors, and thread, I immediately carted them over to the “keep corner” with the rest of the stuff I couldn’t live without.
Other decisions were harder to make.
No matter how much I loved them, there simply wasn’t room for all those books. I weeded out a few of my own and quite a few of Jamie’s, holding on to his Hardy Boys collection and, of course, his copy of Dune, before donating most of them to the downtown library for their annual used book sale. But I slipped one of each of our favorites, including much-read but well-preserved copies of Pride and Prejudice and The Great Santini, onto the shelf of a “Little Free Library” I spotted on my way back from the thrift shop. Though I thought I’d been pretty ruthless when sorting through and weeding out our possessions when packing the boxes in Minnesota, I was amazed by the number of knickknacks, minor memorabilia, and just plain junk we had transported clear across the country.
Why did I think we would need six bud vases? Five boxes of rubber bands? A broken VHS player? A yogurt maker?
Well, that one I did understand. Sort of. It had been a birthday present from my mother, one of her constant and not particularly subtle reminders to watch my weight. I had no intention of using it, but since it was brand new and she’d only given it to me a couple weeks before the move, I felt guilty getting rid of it.
But two years had passed since I’d opened it, which, I was pretty sure, was beyond the gift guilt statute of limitations. And my mother was almost two thousand miles away, so I put it in the Goodwill pile.
Some choices were close to impossible.
A medium-sized box sporting the ubiquitous “Miscellaneous” label contained a mélange of papers, folders, flyers, a kitchen towel, picture frames, and a blue plastic water bottle—and that was just the stuff I saw from the top. It was just too much to deal with at that moment, so I closed the lid and shoved it into the front coat closet, promising myself I’d sort through it all later.
Another, much larger box labeled with a big question mark, because it had apparently been taped shut before I had a chance to list the contents, was filled with Jamie’s winter clothes, things we hadn’t thought he’d need until after we closed on the condo. The moment I opened the lid, the air filled with a scent both strange and familiar—a mixture of ripe grain, sandalwood soap, detergent, and strong coffee. Familiar because, the instant
