Ready to burst

I found my other winter boot, just in time for the first day of spring. It was buried among clothes I'd piled in my basement storage space to donate. I finally began sorting through them last week, hauling giant flexi=black-garbage bag after garbage bag to the back of my car, where they still wait in the second stop of donation purgatory.

Inside the bags are clothes of four sizes, twenty or so pairs of shoes, cheap glass vases, a wireless printer I could never get to work properly and ditched as a $300 loss after months of phone calls and frustration. There's a wine rack that has never held a bottle, and wine bottles I carefully painted and displayed in windows of other apartments. Books I never reviewed. DVDs of pilot TV programs I never watched. Swag from conferences I never found a use for and tote bags -- so many tote bags. 

All of it is from another life, old jobs, past times. It's all stuff that goes beyond not-needing. Each item has become a burden, and I need to clear a path in my basement and head. I need to make room for nothing.

I like seeing the dirty carpet under all of it in my storage space. I welcome the dust and cracked bits of plaster where the piles used to be. 

There's a lot more to haul out in the months ahead. And there's this first full load to get out of the back of my car.

But at least now I can ride to Goodwill with the windows down, letting the dust and past and all that I was holding on to air out on my way.

In all that filth and discarding, I feel the spring indoors. And even on that blue battered carpet, it feels fresh and clean.

Comments

[Bella]

I just love everything about you and your magazine! So inspiring!