Cleanse and Cash

Time is passing so quickly these days as it always does when you feel you don't have enough of it. Business is strong, homeschool is ticking along and slowly, all of the items our "to do" list are being crossed off.

A few weeks ago, I resigned myself to the fact that we will have to hold a garage sale. It is the most efficient way of divesting ourselves of the things that we will not be able to bring with us on our journey across the Pacific. The mere thought of that day makes my stomach hurt. Friends of ours recently had a garage sale of their own and unfortunately, the local paper got the date wrong. A week before they had planned, on a rare, quiet Saturday morning when neither of them had to work, they were startled awake by an insistent POUNDING on their front door.

At 6:30 am.

I'm not the most rational person on most days. I experience a near constant internal dialogue where the kind and reasonable side of my personality wrestles with the larger, impatient, head-shaking, wincing, angry, I'd-like-to-beat-the-tar-out-of-you side.

Let me just say this one thing. If I advertised a garage sale for 7:00am on a Saturday morning and had people thumping on my front door at 6:30am, it would be fugly. I've clearly communicated this personality defect to my husband and asked that he specifically mention the possibility of bloodshed should anyone try to be the uninvited, unwanted, early bird on said morning.

So last weekend, we power washed the garage floor, cleared all the shelves and then filled them, by theme (small appliances, lamps, seasonal, books, etc), with all those things that need a new home. It was enormously satisfying. I was also forced to open two boxes that were being stored in the garage and which hadn't seen the light of day since 1999. I'm not kidding.

I had moved those boxes from Houston to Bentonville, from Bentonville to a different Bentonville address and then from Bentonville, here to Tulsa. Twelve years.

I kept exactly two scrapbooks and a bag of pictures.

As I looked around the kitchen this morning with its absence of steamers, crock pots, popcorn makers, portable ovens, toasters, blenders, mini grills, food processors, beaters and such, I noticed that I preferred the minimalist decor. There is order in the nothingness. I can't say that I will be anxious to clutter all that clean, empty, space in my new environment. There is beauty in less.

Thus, while certainly filled with anxiety in regard to the mechanics of holding a garage sale, I am eager to give our house a colonic.

And the fistful of cash when it's all said and done is better than a kick in the pants.