“We’ve got to kill the storage unit!” she’s said a thousand times. The ten by twenty foot space is crammed and full of dusty treasure: junk, empty boxes, furniture, tools, paintings, antiques, artifacts, a great big rug, a washing machine, a bell jar, clothes, a broken lawnmower, art supplies, packing quilts, camping gear, shoes, old LPs, and boxes in the back we haven’t opened in oh, like seventeen years. No, almost eighteen! I think I’m going to be sick. How have we survived, he asked rhetorically, because it doesn’t really matter, here we are.
Killing the unit means we move and that’s just peachy. On Saturday I found out that the storage company had a vacant storage unit only four doors up the row from ours, closer to the porta-potty, even, and I grabbed it! Now we have a place to put the “keeper” items from the older unit once we pull stuff out and sort it. Brilliant!
I also have no more excuses for not weeding all my bins of ludicrous dead technology (among many other museum pieces) in the old adobe, because I have a place to store whatever I want to keep until we move, and to long-deserving hell with all the rest. For example, in what we call the “closet” in the bathroom is a heavy-duty plastic storage bin almost completely full of old Radio Shack stereo cables, speaker wire, and telephone cables for landline phones. I think there’s some coax in there from an ancient teevee installation, too. The whole thing must weigh forty pounds. Now I’m nauseous again.
“Kill the storage unit, John!” He rents a second one! I love it!
John Hamilton Farr lives at 7,000 feet in Ranchos de Taos, New Mexico, U.S.A. As New York Times best-selling author James C. Moore tells it, John is “a man attuned to the world who sees it differently than you and I and writes about it with a language and a vision of life that is impossible to ignore.” This JHFARR.COM site is the master writing archive. To email John, please see CONTACT INFO on .png)
Well, that’s not completely silly.
No, it’s pure genius! Not only that, but I got a special deal. By paying for two months in advance, I get a third month free. Now all I have to do is, uh, work.
You MUST have room to sort stuff and can always let the old unit go when done. If you don’t have a covered room to sort…it WILL rain. I just went through my box of cables, too, and threw away many. I was at a Goodwill in Denver recently and observed that they already have enough old cables of all sorts to last well past 2100.
Exactly!
there are a couple of thoughts here. If you haven’t missed the stuff in all that time, maybe you should get rid of the box without even looking at it…
The other thought is to read that book about if you don’t love it, get rid of it. It really does feel good to go through things and clean out. CAV would love to have the old stuff.
Plus you have to clean out when you are in the mood to do it or you’ll end up keeping everything. We decluttered before we listed our house in San Diego, then again when we packed to move and again when I unpacked things and asked myself why I ever brought it to Taos anyway. Decluttering is the real estate agent’s word for getting rid of the crap.
Unopened boxes might be cool, though. Nice things we never had a chance to enjoy since we moved so much after we arrived & our lives were so chaotic. Anyway, yes, great advice all around.
I feel for you. We, too, have two big bins of weird cables and old computer stuff. Obsolete junk that no one will ever want. At least you have a finite space to sort out and a trip or two down memory lane awaiting you. It is easy to get attached to “stuff.” We all do.
Storage units hold the parts of ourselves that we hope one day to put into action again. Its both heartbreaking and liberating to let go of the past that we hoped to reactivate in the future. Alas, past the age of 60 its necessary to make these choices.
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