And they are men, young and strong, with good muscles. Those are all good things, because Monday morning they will have about 80 pounds of trash to haul away. If we add in the two large boxes of dead spiny agave from the back yard where the last big blue round ball of it died over the summer, making the total weight somewhere between 90 and a hundred. I know this because I've been sorting, packing and hauling the segments of it out to the curb. Because there hasn't been enough other stuff to do. Or something.
The lightest parts are ordinary garbage, living room, bathroom, and kitchen wastebaskets, one plastic grocery bag at a time with the handles knotted to keep it in place, fitted down in the can that Sun City residents have buried in the ground, with a lid that either lifts up or off, depending on whether one is just adding something to sit until it's picked up, or doing the actual pickup, which involves removing the full metal lid and lifting the whole can up and dumping contents into the huge plastic one on wheels. Every time that one gets full, it's rolled over to the back of the truck, lifted and tipped into the back, then rolled to the next yard, and so forth.
Additional bags of refuse are set outside on the ground, one main reason to keep the food down under the ground where stray dogs, mostly of the coyote variety, can't shred the bags and strew crap all over. So the large bags will have yard waste and such in them. At least, so long is they don't have thorns poking through. Those need tougher containers, like boxes. Like the two of those we'll also have out in the morning.
But we have much more this time than just that. About 2/3 of the weight will be all the non-recyclable remnants of having gone through the decades of photos which have accumulated in the family. I've been working on sorting through that, three full cabinets' worth, for a couple weeks now.
Frankly, I ache!
It's not just the weight, of which there is plenty, and has filled more than tomorrow's haul. It's all the reaching, pulling out, lifting, turning of pages, pulling individual photos out of plastic sleeves or off papers they were semi-stuck to or even fully stuck to, setting keepers in this stack, trash in the next bag, recyclables in a third location, and a whole lot of miscellaneous stuff in other locations. Reorganize, package up and throw, stack and replace, haul back to a chair to do the above with your feet up, take stuff back to cabinets and start on the next stack.
I'm amazed at all the other things included. Somehow a few fossils got thrown in, and some idiot (ahem) thought a good spot for the seashell which fell off a nightlight my parents made as a hobby decades ago, leaving rock hard yellowing lumps of glue behind, would be in the same bag as several larger of the fossils. Because, why not? I had managed to forget these cabinets are where I kept the plaster-of-Paris hand and foot casts of the little ones back when those imprints were two to three inches across. Each single one is still encased in functional pink bubblewrap, after all these years, but otherwise unboxed. That will be fixed. Boxed puzzles made it into the cabinets, totally forgotten.
There are something like 6 times the empty picture frames in the cabinets as filled ones, and nearly all the filled ones have identical photos in other frames in another box right now where they have just been removed from the walls in various room for packing up to take north. Any given favorite baby picture of my kids had at least two other framed versions and a handful of multiple sizes of identical ones unframed. Steve doesn't have quite the same numbers of framed photos of his kids, but he has them, along with several of himself while he was growing up, along with, now, photos of the two of us. These are just the photos. We haven't started on the artwork on all the walls yet. But even among the framed photos are surprises, like one of my mom's parents I never knew I had, or one of her sister, likewise. I'll have to ask a cousin if she wants either originals or digital files of any of those, but not until perhaps a year from now when we're settled in and looking for something to do.
I am convinced every relative we ever sent baby pictures to, some time before dying when they went through a very similar process, found their files of my photos and just knew I needed them all back. If my count is correct, I actually needed about 20 of the photos, mostly grandparents and uncles and aunts. My descendants will know what their ancestors looked like, or at least some of them.
Most of the picked-through albums are disasters, totally unusable. Those are also full of pages of thoroughly stuck-on pictures, binders more of oddball spiral varieties rather than 3-ring ones. Those are curbside in large numbers.
Am I done yet? Are you kidding? There are three rows of stacks of computer discs with who knows what on them. This already old laptop has no slot for CDs any more. I still have an old one which functions and does have the slot, so it will definitely be heading north. Again, some year when total boredom sets in, they'll be gone through. Somewhere in those are also some old cases of video camera tapes, the little mini ones about 2 x 2.5 inches across. A few are actually labeled. Unfortunately, they need the camcorder to play them and then the right amount and types of cables hooking up to the right other tech in order to read them. Let's start with the fact that I had two types of camcorders which used the same tapes, and - guess what? - one got broken and the other was stolen over a year ago in the break-in. Imagine the odds of them ever being viewed.
Then there's a whole boxful - once it gets into a box - of written or writing paper of various sorts. Start with postcards, collected on nearly every trip ever taken in case the hundreds of photos weren't as good. Because of course not. I've just gone through all those from years back, so trust me! Then stacks of all kind of Christmas cards. Know how long it's been since I gave up other people's ideas of holiday cards and sent out my own photos and greetings? Amazingly most of those were in there as well, including some cards I remember fairly well (always better than the actual cards were, of course) but thought long since lost. I always order extra cards when I make them. I believe I have enough old ones to send something out to the entire list. But I won't. Only one of those has me scratching my head wondering what in hell was I thinking when I chose that particular photo? So it's a flower, and it has red and green: big deal! What the heck kind of flower is it, anyway? The tree frog in the wren house was a delightful surprise because I've been hunting for that one in all the wrong places for a dozen years now. The whales one as well.
Among the cards are all kinds of pads of cute stationery. Some comes with envelopes, most not. There are some large, exquisite art cards I bought in Alaska, each of which could be sent out with a message to somebody or framed. Of course I have plenty of frames, I now know. But wall space? I could consider using the old stamps tucked in with them. They aren't "forever" stamps, instead having a price of $.37 each. Not sure what Forevers cost now, but I presume doubling the stamps would do for an ordinary card. Or I could just save them, thinking they will someday be as surprising to the finder as the old $.03 stampI found on a very old letter - say early 50's - was to me. I still clearly recall Mom at the Nevis P.O. complaining how the price of stamps had gone up so high!!!
I found some old newsletters from FRL proving I was on their board back when, in case I need evidence. You know, like to go with a resume when I apply for my next... oh, nevermind. Someday my heirs will go through them and wonder what they are and fill more garbage bags than I've got out right now waiting to be picked up in the morning. Those, and the actual stack of old resumes I also found will be as relevant then as the paper they're written on, in case somebody needs to start a bonfire somewhere. I'm just not ready to toss them yet. It's kind of nice to read them and think I was once somebody, had a history, developed skills, showed up, meant something to others. Just like I keep the old autobiography my dad's mom wrote before she married my grandfather. She was once more than an old woman who stayed in our house for a few months when we lived up in Park Rapids, and made me promise to her that I would never start smoking cigarettes, shortly before my 4-pack-a-day father had his first heart attack and had to stop smoking cold turkey.
Did I mention I ache? Time for some ibuprofin... and supper.
No comments:
Post a Comment