It’s fall — the leaves across the street are turning orange and red, the tree in my backyard is dropping pine cones everywhere, and this weekend the sun was shining high in a perfectly blue sky.
But where was I? As one who loves nature, and hiking, and biking and being outside, what wonderful Saturday activity was I doing as the breeze drifted by and golden leaves fluttered to the ground in the moving hourglass ticking speedily toward winter?
I was in the garage, cleaning and coughing through the dust and organizing piles of garbage and giveaways. I pulled the king-sized mattress I inherited from my grandmother when she passed away in 2006 out of the basement. I hauled out box springs and a leftover antique mirror the previous owners of our house left behind. I lugged out the matching headboard and giant cardboard boxes that once contained television screens and Styrofoam boxes we used to move our freezer food when we moved into our house in 2013, and I started a pile in the garage.
It had to be done. To be honest, I had a beautiful Saturday in the garage coming to me, for the lack of organizing I have done in that space for six years. It’s one of the areas of my house that makes me feel anxious for the clutter and dirt crammed into every nook and cranny. But when I looked around and thought about how to fix it, I felt overwhelmed and unmotivated. So I spent my Saturdays playing instead.
I am used to feeling a twinge of guilt when my friends tell me they worked in the yard, or completed house projects, or remodeled some part of their home on the weekend. I know that’s what I’m supposed to be doing. But strolling through the woods, or biking down a mountain — or even taking a nap — is so much more appealing.
And so what happened on day one of our move — drop the stuff where you can, get the boxes where they go, and figure out the sorting later — turned into a year, then three, then six. And the places where we dropped the first round of things accumulated more things. Weirdly, none of it was ever even used. In six years, some of it had never seen the light of day.
I opened a blue Rubbermaid box that I’d moved from apartment to apartment in my college days. It was covered in stickers and smashed on one end, broken from bearing the weight of too-heavy boxes stacked on top of it for years. The box had an old wool coat with a hood that was just barely too small in the sleeves, so that when I stretched my arms forward my wrists peeked out and got cold. I found a hotel bath robe my dad once bought me after a work trip, and I moved it everywhere, because, to me, it represented the height of luxury.
I found some VHS tapes from school projects, an old red poncho, and a blue and yellow rain suit my friend and I purchased identically in Taiwan. This fall marks one year since she became sick from cancer, almost one year since I attended her funeral and cried until my eyes were stinging and swollen.
I’ve been thinking about her this season. I think of her often, anyway. But this season I am remembering the sights and sounds of my experiences of her last days as I walk the trail, or ride my bike, or breathe in the smell of autumn, where our paths diverged.
I looked at the bath robe, feeling a pull to hang on to it since my dad gave it to me, even though I use a different bath robe, and I haven’t worn that one for 15 years probably. I have better waterproof equipment than that rain suit, too. But I remember the day my friend and I wore those suits in the pouring rain, as we rode our bikes to explore a nearby village. And when we took a picture our faces were beaming with smiles, pure happiness, at the freedom of our lives and the silliness of those blue suits.
I looked around at the other boxes around me, consolidating the VHS tapes into a box with letters and notes from my family. I found journals I hadn’t seen in years, and rediscovered photos I thought had been lost. I added expired car seats, a metal bed frame and a broken hose to the pile of garbage to go to the dump. I loaded the trunk of the car with bags of clothes, the wool coat and the terry bath robe, to take them to a donation center.
I looked around and felt the garage growing, breathing in those spaces that were once filled with unused and ignored items. I swept up old leaves, dead bugs and piles of dirt from the garage floor, and I felt a lightness come that made me feel as though autumn is a gift. All this time I’d been running away from the mess, when all we needed to do was face it, piece by piece.
We’re still not finished — there may be more sunny Saturdays spent in the garage until we’ve purged all of the things that are just taking up space. The rain suit, however, isn’t one of them.
It’s coming inside, for a rainy day.
Amy Choate-Nielsen writes a bi-monthly column on her family experiences and lessons learned from her grandmother, Fleeta, who died before she was born.