A Dream of Junklessness

There once was a time when I could carry on a conversation in a noisy, crowded place and hear what was said back to me. I could also eavesdrop on gossip nearby and understand enough that I could reconstruct the salient details for later analysis over coffee with other interested parties. One of the many disappointments of the aging process is that hearing loss not only turns down the volume on ambient sound, but also blurs the boundary between one sound and another, not only making it tremendously difficult to snatch titillating fragments out of saturated air but also to understand what is being said on television under the competing music.
This same principle also applies to the visual arena. Where once I could scan a packed closet, a cluttered desk, an overstuffed drawer and immediately find the green scarf, the felt-tip pen, the Philips head screwdriver, now it becomes an afternoon's project to find something, scratching through drawers and cupboards, upstairs and down and finally finding it someplace I already looked twice. Glasses do not help. They just add crisp definition to the clutter. It is a cognitive impairment as much as a visual one.
It is easy to follow a conversation where one person is speaking in a quiet room, or anyplace where there is no auditory clutter. Similarly it is easy to find your glasses when they are the only thing present on the table where you normally put them. The trick is to arrange your environment so that this is possible. Even occasionally.
Not so long ago when I was resting between donating 3 boxes of books to the library and a large bucket full of kitchen implements to Goodwill I tried to think of a better means of lightening the load. Some way to offload great heaps of stuff all at once rather than by one stingy carload at a time, but yet retain things I still want or need. I considered garage sales I had passed that looked like the house had vomited onto the lawn. Perfect. I wondered if that would work for me, here, 2 miles down the worst dirt road in Vermont. I close my eyes and imagined the process.
Easy things first to get a start. Drag out that bit of plywood the plumbers cut out of the counter 12 years ago for the drop-in sink and clean off the dead spiders and lumps of caulk. I knew it would be useful one day. Extract a gallon paint can that feels heavy from behind the kerosene. Open it to find half a gallon of completely fossilized dark red paint. Ponder it, trying unsuccessfully to think what there is or ever was around the place that was ever that color. Put it in the driveway and get another. This one is too light. A quarter gallon of light grey - floor of the back bedroom, last painted in the 70s maybe? There is a slime of linseed oil on the surface, but no useful paint left. Put it in the driveway. Continue this until there are 5 such cans in the driveway, and finally a partial quart of something dark with a skin that can be penetrated with a sharp stick. Remove the skin and stir what remains. Blue. Thick but serviceable. Get out a small, completely rigid, paintbrush and laboriously inscribe on the sink cutout "Garage Sale" in dark blue lumpy letters. Prop the sign against the heap of discarded cans in the driveway to dry.
Now for the main event. Since I am already in the garage, might as well see what's here. On the shelves there are a lot of partial containers of various kinds of lubricants. Nope – might need them for the lawnmowers or something. Someday. Several bags of mulch on top of something. I want the mulch and they're too heavy to move right now. Assorted lumber. Nope. Chicken wire. Nope. Huge pile of nested cardboard boxes. Must try to remember to take them to the recycle. Meanwhile too many to move right now to look underneath. Sickle bar! The sickle bar I have been tripping over since 1992. The one that goes with the Gravely tractor out in the barn that is about my age and stopped working in 1993 and is gradually sinking into the dirt floor. We have much in common. There's a good possibility, along with the tiller attachment I know is back there under the chicken wire. But what if I managed to drag it out along with all its rusty attachments and nobody wanted it? Then I would have a Gravely tractor out there as a lawn ornament for the rest of my life, surrounded by its attendant accessories. I'll think about it. Firewood pile. Nope. That's it for the garage.
Walk around the sign, noticing idly that the "l" has dribbled, and around the back to the porch. The cat chair! Perfect! Move a bench, a ladder, a ShopVac, and some birdseed and rassle it out of the corner, through the door, across the deck and around the side of the house, leaving 2 parallel gouges in the grass and a lot of organic material stuck to the chair. Put chair next to the paint cans and sink into it, gasping for breath.
When fully recovered, cruise through kitchen, scooping up an armload of extraneous plastic bowls and pots from the back of the cupboard, a toaster with a dysfunctional element and the one-speed blender. Who would want all those cottage cheese containers? Eight mismatched glasses from broken sets. A dish drainer. 42 kitchen gadgets acquired by many past and present residents of this house and used at least once. Livingroom yields an apple box full of neglected books, a stack of plastic flower pots. An abandoned TV antenna, and an old AM radio. A vase, a candlestick, and a completely useless oil lamp. Cats still use all those bald catnip mice, and I have to sit on something.
The attic. The motherload. Surveying the cascades of objects here, stacked by size and shape in places, by relative fragility in others, I realize what I really need to dump is my acquisitive nature and the crippling notion that any of this stuff will ever prove useful to me. I scoop up a random armload and carry it down to the driveway. Then another and another. I prop the sign, which is now nearly dry, and at least no longer dripping, up against the newspaper box and sink back into the cat chair. I look around at this eager young landfill growing around me and anxiously await the first customers.
I open my eyes now before I can imagine the dust from passing traffic settling on the sprawl of extraneous goods clogging my driveway, or the mess resulting from an unexpected afternoon rainstorm. I sigh and comfort myself with the thought that I saved myself all the effort and frustration of dragging all that junk out to the driveway, and instead peer dispiritedly into the downstairs closet in case there is something there I can offload onto the Salvation Army.