I’ve heard it said that every key on your key chain represents another responsibility. So, what if you have no idea what a key used to open? We threw away nearly 30 keys during a recent weekend, as well as numerous knickknacks and doodads that have needed to be repaired for as many as three years while they took up shelf or drawer space. We are doing our best to work together on a situation towards which we have very different perspectives.
Photos and Commentary by Rick Hiduk
For the past few months, I’ve dedicated as much time as possible each weekend to “attacking” a corner of our small country home. I remove every houseplant, every collectible ceramic container, and everything else that has been slid under or between them to another room. I wipe down and/or vacuum each piece of furniture as they too are removed temporarily for the purge. The walls, the ceiling, and the floor or rug are all cleaned before the things that truly belong there are returned, freshly polished, of course.
Believe it or not, this is a task I once relished as part of keeping our home clean and orderly. Two things changed that. Our current house is tiny, despite the property being large, and my husband decided to become more involved in the purchasing and selling of antiques. Every new property pick or trip to an auction results in an influx of new old stuff to our house. Many of Mike’s finds are downright cool or at least noteworthy. The problem this past winter was that most of these cool things were not going to the antique shop or to ebay buyers as fast as they were coming in, and the merely noteworthy stuff was just getting buried.
I really am not a neat freak. I can deal with some dirty dishes on the kitchen counter, a back porch that catches everything that we don’t want in the house, and jumper cables and old water bottles tangled up on the floor of back of my truck where nobody ever sits. But I draw the line when clutter usurps function: when an area can no longer be utilized because so much unused stuff is in the way.
As our entire downstairs slowly came to a standstill, Mike started talking again about wanting chickens in the spring. After all, we have a chicken coop…full of junk. Some of that junk, primarily records, was mine. I made a deal with him that, if he wanted chickens, we needed to get rid of a lot of stuff in a hurry. We were not simply going to move the stuff from the chicken coop into our tiny barn, only to find more stuff in the barn to move to the house or greenhouse so it could be listed on ebay. Besides, it was time to start planting in the greenhouse.
Because our home is too isolated and impractical for a yard sale, we collaborated with some neighbors closer to Route 6 to have a big sale in their yard and garage. The first night that we started packing boxes, Mike seemed excited about the new space he was creating. But by the third night, he was slowing down the mass purge and getting lost in the contents of each box. We certainly did get a lot to the sale, which took two weekends instead of one due to a late-season snow, but I’d hoped that we’d get rid of so much more.
The chicken coop was now only half empty. I’m sure that Mike sees it as only half full.
I’ve certainly known for the better part of the 20 years we have been together that I’d fallen for a pack rat. His father is a pack rat, while his mother is not. His father has a two story, two-bay garage. We do not. If I’ve learned anything about marriage, it’s that you cannot change behavior that innate. You must learn to be counterintuitive. The only way to balance out Mike’s habitual hoarding is for me to simplify my own life as much as possible.
I started to take a closer look at the boxes and files full of things that I had convinced myself that I’d have forever…or at least until I could process them to the next stage, whatever that means. Pulling clothes out of my closet and drawers was easy. My fashion sense is so conservative that I easily found four almost identical pin-stripe shirts. I kept the one that fit the best, and the other three went into a bag for the Sally. And so on. I am methodically becoming a minimalist, and it feels great.
But I knew that I still had a big mental hurdle to cross – one that would challenge my own notions of “possession,” “sacred,” “forever” and “need” versus “want.”
My record collection stood out as the epitome of what I had once thought was most important to me in life. I had begun collecting 45s and lps as a kid, added to it extensively while I worked in radio, then became enthralled with 78s as my yearning for musical knowledge went backwards to the early 1900s. I became an expert in a field that few would ever care about again, and I felt a unique comfort in that.
Comfort. That was it. I suddenly realized that it was time for me to leave my comfort zone if I was truly going to start moving forward again.
I shocked Mike by finally putting in some calls to records dealers whose numbers he had been giving me for a while. I pulled my 45s, lps, and 78s together from three parts of the property and posted photos of them on Facebook. My goal was to wholesale the collection, most of it tagged with meticulously written slips of paper detailing each records condition, chart performance, and resale value.
“I still can’t believe that you really doing this,” my sister expressed on Facebook. Long-time friends were surprised as well.
I know that there was well more than $1,500 in records there had I had the time and space to pare them out and list them separately or even in lots on Craigslist or ebay. But I knew that, like Mike getting lost in his boxes of stuff, I’d become mired in a task for which I did not have nearly as much desire as just not caring about them anymore.
I let a local teen who’d just recently taken interest in classic rock on vinyl comb through the collection with an adult friend, just as I had done as many as 40 years ago to bring these treasures home in the first place. I felt bad charging him a dollar per album for the 20 or so he picked out, knowing that I’d paid a quarter of fifty cents each for him, but he was thrilled. I was thrilled to see that he had my David Bowie’s “Let’s Dance” album.
An hour later, a record collector I’d called showed up, and I gave him the deal of the century on the rest of the 12-inch records. I cut deeply into my profit potential by making him take all 12 boxes and crates, even though he had little interest in my old big band and jazz lps or all of my cool 12-inch dance and alternative singles. The next day, I drove about ten boxes of 45s to a DJ friend and exchanged them for a piece of equipment. He then agreed to take the 78s.
They are gone….all of my record babies. Figuratively, it was time for them to leave the nest. I still have hundreds of CDs, as well as iTunes and other downloads, I remain immersed in music, and I knew that I would be. All but giving away my record collection gave me an incredible sense of freedom, however, and a desire to divest myself of even more things that I do not need.
When I went to the closet yesterday to switch out my winter and summer comforters, I came across two irons. “Why do I have two irons?” I ask myself. One is obviously new and in good shape, and the other is likely 30 years old. Mike reminded me that my grandmother Ruth had given it to me when she liquidated her house. I’d kept it in case I ever needed another one. That was the old me. Grandma’s iron is now in the Sally box.
More purging to come!