I was walking my imaginary dog along the beach last week.
One of the good things about Juno being so tiny is that he can pop into the post office or chemist with me and everyone just thinks I have a dust bunny at my heels. This may change soon. I might become less enamoured of those pleading eyes and decide I need a different dog. A Husky, maybe. With piercing blue eyes and no fear of shells at all.
While I was Googling Huskies, a friend called with big news: “I’ve done it!” Pregnancy was out of the question. Had she eloped with her imaginary lover?
No. She’s putting her house on the market. No one can say she’s not a woman of action, having only been talking about it for five years. I was delighted for her new future. New plans, meaning a massive surge of adrenalin and happy, happy, joy, joy, pheramones.
That is, until the ‘pre on the market flurry’ morphs quickly into the ‘pre on the market slump’. As with everything in life, you have to take the good with the bad. And, clearing out 15 years of one’s life in a home is not only cathartic, it is also absolute hell. Never mind, we were going to de-clutter. Maria Condo…pfft. We were going to expose her for the amateur she is. In hindsight, clearly she is a stronger woman than us, but my friend and her team gave it our all.
How do we amass so much ‘stuff’? Why do we keep every birthday card anyone’s ever given us tucked away in shoeboxes stuffed in cupboards (talk about dust bunnies)? And why, why do we think we need nine sets of sheets – now with a faint yellowy hue and imbued with musty, mothball odour, for single beds we don’t own?
In tackling my friend’s linen cupboard, I was taken back to my past house moves. Similar situation –cards, unused sheets, duvet covers. Clothes I’d never wear. Ditto shoes. I’d de-cluttered extensively. And
I haven’t missed a single thing I got rid of. Actually, not entirely true – I did miss my husband a bit.
Anyway, my friend’s boxes, no matter how precious, had to go.
We sat down to sort the contents. Depending on whose point of view you take, it went well. Our first mistake was opening a bottle of wine. Our second was drinking it. Because, after a couple of wines, all those old photos of people you don’t recognise and appear to belong to another tribe altogether, all those six boxes of weensy pink shells (Juno would approve) and giant, stripy ones (Juno’s nightmare), simply couldn’t be ditched.
We discussed a jaunt to the beach to scatter the shells, but which beach? And would we be messing with nature’s delicate balance on that beach? The only sensible thing to do – wipe off the thick layers of dust on the boxes and stack them on the floor by the linen cupboard, where, for a couple of hours, we’d pretend they weren’t going back in the cupboard.
I did manage to fill two rubbish bags and a couple of cartons with linen for the SPCA. Hopefully cats and dogs don’t mind mothball odour.
Next, her bedroom. “How do you sleep in here?”
“I don’t. I sleep in the spare room,” she answered, obviously thinking it quite normal.
Within seconds it was clear we needed dust masks. Unfortunately, the dust masks she found had so much ingrained dust in them, we, coughing and eyes streaming, chucked them into the bin. Never buy a bed without a base. Too much can fit underneath. I pulled out boxes of broken china, more shells, old magazines. It was a biological health hazard under there. We couldn’t breathe and I swear the dust bunnies were more like dust dinosaurs.
I moved onto that one drawer we all have for bits and bobs. A screwdriver, rusty nail, small tube of glue you used once and will never be able to use again, a real estate agent’s note pad, wine bottle corks, old Sellotape you cant find an end to, dead batteries, a pen that doesn’t work – the necessities of life.
Turfing all that flotsam and jetsam that anchors us down cleanses our spirits.
Once we had cleared the house of some of my friend’s ‘anchors’, scrubbed and polished, prettied the garden up, her smile widened and she walked two feet off the ground, giddy with possibility. Until she got sideswiped with early onset seller’s remorse. You begin to berate yourself for not de-cluttering sooner, for letting ‘stuff’ creep into every corner. Then you fall in love with your home again and wonder why you are selling.
As my friend’s feet hit the clean floor, her giddiness dispersed and she thanked her lucky stars she had kept the damn shells. The only thing to do was breathe deep and open another bottle of wine. I patted her on the back as she threw the cork into the rubbish. (DEIRDRE THURSTON)
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