We had two yard sales in two Sundays.The reason is because, even though the math says that this house is only 10% smaller than our old house, it is rejecting about 30-35% of our stuff. Perhaps this new house has moral reasons. I would probably nod knowingly if you told me that our new house--in its California, hippie-ish town with its less-is-more way of life--is offended that we moved a billion pounds of crap here and wanted to shove all that crap through its adorable stuccoed face.
Take, for example, the rocks. I realized when we got here and started unpacking that we had shipped--across the entire country--ten or eleven softball-sized stones I had collected over the years, usually from beaches. They weigh about eight pounds each, totalling about three toddlers' worth of geological debris. We made the struggling public university system of the brokest state in the union pay to move our (um, my) ROCKS. I don't want to set an ugly precedent here and curse, so I'm just going to say that yes, we know we are a word that starts with "a" and ends with "holes."
We also have kept all of the trappings of any Future Baby. We'd like to have another kid, most days, so we've schlepped one giant trash bag filled with clothes for each clothing size, and a kid goes through four sizes in the first year, and Ellie's two and a half, and big, so we have sizes up to 4T. So, in a way, Future Baby currently lives in our garage, and her name is Ridiculous Mountain O'Babygear. If she's turns out to be a boy, 80% of Ridiculous's stuff will have been pointless to move, so please refer back to the last sentence of the previous paragraph.
Finally, one of our rooms at our new house is doing double-duty as an office and sewing room, rooms that in our house were separate. This is the room I wish were a black hole, where matter could co-exist with other matter, only I would need to be able to reach in to this place of infinite storage and pull sewing notions out. Whether Mark could reach into our black hole room and extract Target receipts to enter into Quicken is of little interest to me. Actually, it'd be nice if he couldn't so that. Sometimes stuff is on sale and I can't help it.
But alas, our "sewing office" is nothing like a black hole, and the matter in it can't share space with other matter, and it can't share that space with Ridiculous Mountain O'Babygear, who lives in our garage, or with the three toddlers' worth of rocks, so some things had to go, y'all. Like, about 30% of our things.
The easiest stuff to get rid of was clothing. I just had to look in my closet, ask myself what I actually wear in the course of my actual life, and then prune. I pruned like an axe-murderer got trapped in my closet. No one needs 20 pairs of jeans (this is not the actual number--I'm trying to make a point), even if 4 of them are maternity and 4 of them are post-maternity, and 4 of them are for the moderately fat phase you go through about four months after you lose all your pregnancy weight (by the way, what the hell???). And no one needs clothes for a job they haven't had in three years and won't have for another three. For me, that meant high school teacher clothes, which made me sad, but this house isn't a black hole, and I can't keep everything. Pale blue khakis aren't going to make a job I loved dearly come back to me. They're just not.
Linens and blankets were bulky and easy to give away provided no one we knew made them. Unfortunately, I collect quilts. Hrmph.
Kitchen stuff: super easy! I do not give a crap about that seventh wooden spoon! Sell it!!
Pregnancy pillow that looked great on the web but made me feel like I was trapped in quicksand: just don't tell the hugely pregnant woman who stops by for all the baby stuff. You know, maybe she won't feel that way. Maybe she's nimble and spry....at eight months.
Once everything was organized into shallow, wide boxes for easy display or on shelves in the garage, we posted on craigslist and let the magic happen. There were four or five things that we put price tags on, but mostly everything was "pay what's fair." We had a very, very flexible definition of "fair." After all, we wanted all this stuff gone, so what's "fair" when you'd put it on the curb the next day anyway? Curb alert people will not be leaving us a quarter for that painting, so we might as well take it from the elderly woman who keeps offering a quarter for every single thing in our garage, even items with, say, a hard drive, or fifty years' worth of gorgeous patina.
On the first Sunday, we got about five people, but two of them were Mary Louise and Inez, who managed to mutually convince each other that they needed about 25% of what we had. They were lovely and funny and lively and hungry for our junk. I wanted to invite them over for dinner because we all had such a nice time that morning, but I refrained. Of the $186 we made that day, $110 of it was theirs. I also met a sweet neighbor and her son, who kept calling me "auntie" in Chinese. I saw her today while I was driving and we waved happily at each other.
On the second Sunday, during which we sold leftovers from the first Sunday and newfound junk from the week between, we got a better crowd. Reuben came and scored all the electronics to ship to his son who's starting university in Mexico. Three Japanese women came and tested everything in the garage, from oven mitts to hot rollers to children's toys. They laughed so much I couldn't help but laugh with them, a trait I tend to have regardless of the situation, but maybe more when three women are test-driving a ceramic pitcher and pouring imaginary beverages onto my garage floor. Dan showed up last. He owns an antique store in town and he asked me about poetry (there were books of mine) and Mark's time in the Navy (there were military items), but he made the mistake of telling me most of my vintage stuff was overpriced and that I should sell it all to him at a crazy discount so he could take it back to his store and sell it for what I was asking. Um, no. This woman eBays, sir. I did sell him $25 worth of stuff I didn't want to deal with, and he put it all in the back of his truck, with a broken guitar and a rocking chair and some brass fixtures he got at another sale, gave me his number, and told me to tell my ex-flight-surgeon husband that if he ever wanted to go up in a fixed-wing to call him, since he was retired Air Force and had a plane at a regional airport nearby. That was cool.
What didn't sell in the yard sales will be picked up by one of the many roving trucks dispersed by various charities in Northern California. Unlike those in Philadelphia, these charities make their rounds once or twice a month instead of once a year, leaving postcards with dates and instructions and asking for everything from electronics to household items to clothing. On Wednesday, a cancer charity will come to our street, see our seven boxes and five garbage bags of stuff we don't need in this chapter of our lives, and take them away. Hopefully they will help two sets of people in the process.
I'm happy with our house now, and while I thought that getting rid of that much stuff would leave me feeling naked, I feel delightfully content. I will wear the clothes in my closet, stir soup with each of the spoons in my kitchen (not one soup with all the spoons...you know what I mean), sew with the notions that fit unobtrusively in the sewing office I share with the hubby. What we have, we want and need. What we will no longer have after Wednesday, well that was only giving us anxiety. None of it was helpful anymore and ridding ourselves of it feels good.
I did, incidentally, keep the rocks. I'll find a place where they can be round and smooth, and beautiful again. I decided that they need to do a little community service and make amends for their embarrassing joyride.
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