Garage Sale Confessions

Many years ago my husband and I lived in an 800 square foot condo in downtown Toronto. When we bought my Dad’s house in Oakville I had no idea what we were going to do with the 1500 square feet. I imagined hosting dance parties galore with karaoke nights on Sunday! Everyone welcome! So when we eventually moved to a rural area and a bigger house, doubling our living capacity, I imagined us floating around our light and airy space both indoors and out.

Not. Somehow our jammed to the rafters 800 square foot condo capriciously billowed into a large four bedroom house with two huge storage rooms and a double garage! How is this possible? We are only two people. There must be a team of “stuff” gremlins that sneak into my house on an ongoing basis and cram George Foreman grills, neck and back massagers, World’s Greatest Dad mugs and Christmas pate knives into every nook and cranny when I’m not looking. I’ll deal with those pests later. I decide that the best way for us to ‘downsize” is to hold a tried and true, time tested, classic garage sale. How hard can that be?

Project Just Deal With It was born. Taking it one vacuum packed closet at a time I voraciously swam through all the thingamabobbers and whatchamacallits and prepared them for their final journey, tossing them into the boxes I enlisted to transport them to their new destiny….. someone else’s house. Like a Dyson Phantom I swept up the doodads with reckless abandon.

Then it happened. All of a sudden without any warning a little wooden bird with a cigar hanging out of his beak and a jaunty cap on his head pecked me in the heart with his can opener neck. I was immediately beamed back in time to an endless stream of family celebrations (my family likes to celebrate, often and heartily – and they don’t need a reason) where this little guy was always at the ready to pop off a bottle cap…and there were many. But here he had found his way into my house and I was about to evict him.

As I looked into the boxes and the yet unfiltered drawers and shelves, staring back at me was all the stuff I had gathered over the years and was about to dispose of. Like the sun coming up on a new day the realization of how two people had managed to fill so much space over time came to me. We hadn’t filled our house with doohickeys. We had filled our home with memories.

So now you must be thinking I gave in to the emotion, sat down on the floor and ever so tearfully and slowly went through every gadget and abandoned the garage sale? Yes and no. I gave myself the time and took everything that was warm and comforting and savoured the memory it brought me. Then I stored it in my heart and that’s where it now lives. The whosits and whatnots went into the garage sale and can now make new memories with their newly adoptive families.

Mr. Cigar Bird? He’s still here.

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Contact
Daina Makinson
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