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"A friend is moving," he says.
"I'm never moving again in life," I respond. "I'm taking advantage of it. He can have some things he'll need, and I can be rid of 'stuff.'"
Being rid of stuff was never part of my vision until I was 53. "Being rid of" results from "getting rid of," a skill I had never even witnessed, never mind practiced. I come from a family of collectors, not in that antiques, fine-linens, cool-art, or even thimbles-displayed-in-shadow-boxes way. More in that might-need-it, how-fun, but-Delores-gave-it-to-me! kind of way.
And so when I moved a few years ago from my 40 acres on a dirt road in Mt. Chase, just outside of Patten, to the small Bangor apartment I now call home, I had no idea what to do with my "stuff
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My children had moved away, but weren't settled: college, the military, no place for "stuff."
The day before the once-in-a-lifetime yard sale, my daughter and I spent all morning putting out teapots and cast iron muffin tins, all my old '60s dresses she had no interest in, the accumulations of a family. We were about to tackle the barn, a wounded behemoth, its tar paper peeling back like hangnails. We stood on the deck with the bird feeder swaying at the end of a knotted telephone cord looped around a branch of the red maple tree we'd planted when she was two.
My new life has a red maple and birds, but no deck, no feeder, and, for sure, no place to store "stuff." Teacups and slices of whole wheat bread in hand, we continued to eye the barn through the Oriental poppies and the blur of black flies. My daughter put her cup on the railing and turned her now-serious-looking, large, dark brown eyes to me.
"Mom," she asked, "is there even anything good up there?"
"Good?" I wondered. "Good? What does she mean by good?"
My daughter was into exploring traditions, connections, old jewelry, and furniture. But only the valuable kind or cherishable ones. Not the plain, the torn, the tarnished. She wanted grand traditions, substantial connections, solid bird's eye maple rockers with both the rockers, beautiful antique jewelry (not her grandmother's pink plastic pop-its).
Of course it was good: old picture frames, the metal washtub from Lyman's, my mother's horse-hair chairs in the original black covering that could never quite contain the horse-hair itch. A box of metal adornments from Irene's burned barn, once-good cherry wood for some furniture project, a broken sleigh, buckets and boxes. Goat stanchions, a burled log. Nails and screws and handleless axes.
I knew that when I slid open the barn's splintered door, whole lives would come tumbling out.
See, here's the thing I know about stuff: Its people cling to it. Their scent, their voices, their stories. Layers of them. And so, every time then-15-year-old Samantha hauls out that turquoise Twiggy dress she found at my yard sale, she's adding another layer to the story of the dress I wore on a bruised-sky, late afternoon in 1967 when I fell in love for the very first time.
Annaliese Jakimides (pronounced "jah KIH mih deez") is a writer and artist living in Bangor. You can read more of her work in The Essential Hip Mama: Writing from the Cutting Edge of Parenting, published by Seal Press.
