I moved into my new apartment almost twenty-three months ago and I’m still opening boxes and bags. After making hundreds of trips to the garbage bins 90 paces away, I have to admit, my living room still looks like a storage space and a train wreck. An unbelievable amount of stuff I have dragged from one apartment to another as I have moved 18 times since leaving my parents’ home at the tender age of 19. I wish I had crappy taste so that the stuff I throw away is more junk than just an old version of something valuable. Now that my grandparents and parents have gone on their final journeys, I have inherited some of their stuff as well. Since I come from a long line of pack rats, it’s amazing to me that I can actually walk through the living room and can actually see a portion of my hardwood floor.
The last place I lived was a studio where I started a decorative arts business, and I kept the contents of my one bedroom apartment in storage. I figured the cheapest way to live right then was in a studio, where I could live and paint without worrying about making enough to pay the rent. Light and gas was included and my landlady liked the fact I was an entrepreneur like herself. When I first rented a 8x8 storage space, I packed it to the rafters and paid less than $100. By the time I was ready to move, I had graduated to a 12x16 room loaded up with stuff from my grandmother’s apartment on top of my possessions and the rental fee was over $300 a month. It was a huge 8-floor facility and what I liked about it was it was indoor and enclosed – no bugs or vermin could get in.
I fell in love with the new place almost immediately, and had to go through the credit check, letters of recommendation, background check, income verification – the whole nine yards. My new landlord also liked the fact I had my own business and that I also wrote fiction (even though I didn’t tell him what kind of fiction – erotica can turn some people off). I was ecstatic when I found out that the apartment was mine so I started tossing stuff. I had en-massed a great deal of stuff while living in the studio. A lot of things were easy to get rid of as they had outlived their usefulness, and other things had been soiled by mice that had chewed their way through my closet wall and set up camp behind my refrigerator. My artwork and paint supplies were packed to keep out air, dirt and water so they were safe. After a two day, two-way move, my 1 bedroom met my studio into my new apartment. It was nice to see some of the old items I treasured, my chiming clocks, stereo, old air conditioner, Royal typewriter from the 1930s and my record collection. I threw out the air conditioner as well as the microwave because I wasn’t sure if they would work properly after all those years in storage. I had been sleeping on a twin futon in the studio and when I got set up, I put together half of my queen size captain’s bed, placed the twin on that and tossed the old queen futon.
The first three months, I gave tons of stuff away to charity, clothes, books, small appliances, cassettes, bedding, towels, radios, portable tvs with built in CD players and shoes. I was glad to part with these items as well as quite a bit of my grandmother’s stuff. However, as I opened boxes I was ready to toss, I found novels, short stories and story ideas written on college and narrow ruled looseleaf paper, not just a couple but scores of them in varying degrees of completion. It made me wonder, when did I have the time to sit and write all this by hand? Believe it or not there is a small file cabinet filled with stuff from when I was in my 20s. I’m almost afraid to look in that after finding so much creativity stashed away with old books and magazines.
Twenty-three months after moving in here, there is still boxes and bags I have yet to unpack. After working a full time job all day the last thing I want to do is take a trip into the past. On the weekends there is the usual stuff I need to do and by the time I get through with that stuff, I am exhausted. When the three day weekends fall around, all I want to do is sleep. I have two accordion folders filled with those short stories and have actually started typing them up. The hilarious thing is I kept a great deal of stuff on floppy disks which were saved in a format too old for my computers to read so that’s painful; because I have a feeling there were even more stories actually completed on those disks. Did I mention the dollar store bound books that I tried to complete a story within the sparkly hologram covers that I frequently purchased of various sizes to feed the need to create?
I just watched two episodes of Hoarders on A&E. No, I don’t have a collection of cow salt and pepper shakers, or packs of items and clothes with the tags still on them heaped up to the ceiling. The organizer on one of the episodes instructed the hoarder to take a sheet and block off an area to work in and stick with it until it’s clean. That’s just how I’m going to handle this insanity, a little creativity at a time, while watching my 25- year-old 19” tv, that makes the strangest squeal when it’s warming up. Only way to fly.
