I've discovered that I'm a hoarder, and of the very worst kind. I have what seem like centuries-worth of papers, magazines, receipts, cards, notes, etc., that should've been thrown away but that I thought might have some significance some day.
One of the great opportunities that moving presents is the chance to purge anything and everything that isn't absolutely necessary or has real meaning. Thus, I'm saying goodbye to years of Martha Stewart's Living and other magazines, which I've kept around in the hopes that someday I'd get to leaf through their picture-pretty pages once more. It hasn't happened yet, and the likelihood at this point is that it never will. To the garbage bag with them!, I say.
As I fill huge garbage bag after huge garbage bag with things that I should've shed a long time ago, I get a feeling of renewal and of clean-slatedness that is energizing.
Recently, I reorganized the top of my chest of drawers (we're starting to "stage" our house for a hopefully quick and profitable sale soon), and loved the result of only leaving a few things on top of what had been a crowded surface only moments before. I loved it so much that I'm going to keep it that way when we move and start anew in the tiny village of my small college on the hill.
I'm quite the fan of HGTV shows like Designed to Sell and House Hunters. In the first one, a team of experts comes to a house that hasn't sold and with a $2,000 budget they make improvements that often help the house finally sell. In the second one, you get to share the experience of one or two people who are looking for a house to buy. They usually visit three houses during the span of the show and choose one as their abode, and you get to see the changes they make once they've moved in and been settled for a while.
Back when we were in Puerto Rico and moving to the States was still a hope rather than a reality, I used to watch House Hunters and dreamed of the moment when that would be us, my husband and I, trying to find our own home en estos lares. Our house hunting has never been like it's on TV, since we've never found the home that took our breath away (we probably can't afford such a home anyway), but we've been house hunters in Ohio twice and now we'll be going at it in some future date for a third (and hopefully last!) time.
Getting a new house every 3 or 4 years isn't ideal, of course, given that we've only been here seven years but that's how things have worked out. I forced us to move out of our first house in the suburbs, not only because it involved a daily 52-mile commute for me to and from the state university, but also because our neighbors were untenable.
On one side, we had very nice people, whose sons appeared to have some kind of illicit business going on as strangers came in and out of their house at all hours and an acrid, but unmistakable, smell wafted toward us from their back yard. On the other, we had an absentee-father and absentee-mother household where the youngest and most psycho of the kids liked to split spray cans with a hatchet, set a lighter to the spray of a spray can, and dress up their bird-feeder pole so he could shoot at it with some kind of gun.
A few houses down, meanwhile, we had a neighbor who strung a dead deer from his garage after hunting it (I guess). A few houses up on the other direction we had another kid, a good friend of the psycho's, who joined him in their favorite prank of exploding illegal firecrackers near our house, just to watch me jump. Back then, I was alone in the house recovering from my surgery and my husband was at work most of the day, so it became a harassment that I just didn't want to live with. It turned out that the police in that suburb were as useless as the absentee parents in controlling two wacko adolescents, so the only solution I saw to the problem (short of adolescentcide, which would have ruined any future I dreamed of) was to move.
That experience taught me that it's not really "location, location, location" when it comes to buying a house, but that one also needs to find out about the neighbors. No location in the world makes up for the crap I had to put up with when I lived in the suburbs, which cured me of that desire forever and ever Amen.
In contrast, we've been wonderfully lucky here in our small city (especially given that we checked out the neighborhood for a year before we bought the house), and our neighbors are truly awesome. We will be sad to leave them behind when we move.
But, alas, such shedding, both material and personal, is inevitable at this stage. With my husband going back to establishing his own freelance writing/editing/translating business, and with me needing to be up in my small college on the hill more often once I start there full-time in July, this house no longer makes sense in our long-term life plan. And if the commute of 52 miles a day was exhausting, the 100-mile commute to the small college on the hill with these gas prices is financially suicidal.
Thus, the shedding and the discarding of everything that isn't absolutely essential or that means something continues unabated. We will both miss this house but (change-junkie that I am) I look forward to the new, minimized, life that awaits us. My husband says he's not convinced that I won't just pick up where I left, and simply rebuild my hoarding empire. But I'm asking him to have a little more faith in me.
It's true that I've been an unrepentant hoarder, and perhaps that malaise is an incurable one. But, as with almost any addiction or mental illness, as long as I accept it and realize what it means, I can manage and combat the urge to hoard and collect and pack and stack.
Just as little green leaves are starting to sprout all over, I've turned a new leaf. I'm ready to become a recovering hoarder, and minimize, minimize, minimize.
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