If I can’t take it with me, where do I stash it?
By Burton W. Cole
One learns a lot when boxing up one’s house for moving. The biggest thing one learns is, “I couldn’t possibly be the one who kept these useless things all these years. It had to be the other one who lives here.”
So far, I’ve excavated enough lamps and chairs from among the assorted assemblage to open a home goods store. I’ve no idea how they all came to live at my house. My guess is garden gnomes.
I know that explanation doesn’t make sense. But the alternative — that WE collected all this stuff ON PURPOSE — defies even more logic than garden gnomes swiping furniture from your house and tossing it into mine. But there it is. All of it. Crammed into every nook and cranny.
My wife passed away in June. She couldn’t take it with her.
In mid-January, I moved to a one-bedroom apartment in Falmouth. I can take it all with me, but I won’t. There’s no room.
I’m slowly sifting through everything we and the garden gnomes accumulated inside our two-story Ohio home and garage over the last 30 years.
Our house was furnished in what’s known in interior decorating circles as Late 1900s Hand-Me-Down.
My late wife was the queen of thrift store bargain hunters. The only reason we didn’t have more lamps, chairs, tables, blenders, mixers and bookcases wedged into our place is that we didn’t own a pickup truck.
But I confess, I aided and abetted. I never met a bookstore I didn’t like. And when libraries or thrift stores offered up a bag of books for $3, I bought $15 worth.
It’s both quite an economical motif, and it sneaks up on you. Before you know it, garden gnomes have dumped so much gently and roughly used STUFF into your rooms, sheds and garage that you can’t remember why you wanted it in the first place.
And even if you can’t remember why you acquired something that you can’t use, neither can you toss it.
“Somebody could use that. Wasn’t you sister looking for one? Your brother? Oh, it was that guy we passed walking down the road last week. He looked like he needed it. Just shove it into that corner over there until we see him again.”
Since losing my sweet Terry and deciding to move to Kentucky, I’ve returned boxes and bags full of wonders back to the thrift stores from whence they came. Many larger pieces will be left as parting gifts to whomever buys my house (unless the garden gnomes mercifully abscond with it all and dump it at your place).
The rest is being boxed for storage or to tuck somewhere inside my little apartment.
Maybe I’ll “accidentally” lose a few boxes on the drive south — sort of like the pioneers lightening their covered wagon loads on the trek West nearly 200 years ago.
It was the great philosopher Anonymous who sagely stated: “Home is where the heart is — even if you can’t remember which box you packed it in.”
I’ve been packing boxes and slowly losing my checkbook, keys, underwear and my mind. They’re all in there somewhere — except maybe my mind — and in two or three or 17 years, I will find everything again. Unless it fell into one of the thrift store boxes. Or got lost in the wagon ride. Or the garden gnomes snagged them.
One thing’s for sure — I’ve learned my lesson and will never, ever play packrat again as long as I… Hey, look! A used bookstore! And they’re having a 50-cents-a-bag sale!
I’ll be right back. Try to keep the garden gnomes out. One can’t be too careful. Especially when one has no one else to blame.
If you see him at burton.w.cole@gmail.com or on the Burton W. Cole page on Facebook, duck! He’s probably trying to unload two lamps and a garden gnome.