I am haunted by stuff

I am surrounded by, drowning in and yes, haunted by stuff. 

Several years ago, when my family combined their lives - and stuff - with mine, I was frankly overwhelmed. Seemingly overnight I went from a house that held me and my stuff (and yes I have a lot of stuff) to a home filled with other lives and other stuff.  Closets were packed, rooms were full and even the deck was overflowing. And the garage...oh dear, the garage! Boxes and plastic crates and furniture stacked halfway up the walls, spilling over onto the floor, with a small path plowed from the door to the house thru the garage to the door to the outside. So. Much. Stuff. 

I'd like to say that 4 years later it is all under control, but I try hard not to lie. I have spent hours in the garage, sorting, rearranging, organizing, throwing out, combining boxes. And yet, here it is, Spring 2021, and it is still basically the same. Oh sure, there is a wider path between the two doors, and I suppose that is an achievement of sorts. But it seems that, even if I spent hours in the garage, I barely scratched the organizing surface. So it was easier to just close the door and let it all sit there, in the garage, until early this spring, when, bolstered by reading countless blogs on decluttering your life, I decided enough was enough. A bunch of boxes in the garage was not going to define me or keep me from living my best life. By golly, I was reclaiming my life, or at least my garage. 

But first, this... 

Last Fall we came to the realization that a mouse had joined our family. A MOUSE. In my garage. In my stuff. Living there. Eating there. Nesting there. Maybe starting a family there. I have a history with mice. I do not like them. I do not want to be anywhere near them. I once shared an apartment with mice, but that was someone else's property. I could, and did, move. But this house is MINE and I refuse to have a MOUSE in MY garage. Slight problem. Apparently just wishing them away does not work. It turns out you have to trap them, but to trap them you have to be able to set traps around the perimeter of the garage. I haven't seen the perimeter of the garage in 4 years. And then, just after the first of the year, the mouse was gone. As if by magic. No more scribbling sounds of scampering little mouse feet when you switched on the garage light. No more scurrying little mouse body seen out of the corner of your eye. It was gone as though it was never there. I almost wept with gratitude and never gave it another thought. 

And then I found it. Well, not it, but where it had been nesting. I had begun emptying some of the many, many boxes my mom brought with her by opening, sorting, combining and, don't tell her, simply throwing stuff away. It felt glorious. I had tackled about 10 of the smaller boxes and was feeling quite proud of myself, so I decided to open some of the dozen or so larger ones. The ones that are about as high as your waist and are packed with lightweight items. Like the one I opened that was full of packing paper and exactly one lampshade. The mouse house/box had similar paper packing but included a quilt used as even more packing for apparently another single lampshade. I reached in to pull the quilt out and froze, realizing that the quilt was shredded along with the packing paper.  Shredded because the mouse had created a cozy nest for itself. I yanked my hand back so quickly I am lucky it didn't dislocate itself, closed the box, left the garage, sat at the kitchen table and poured a glass of wine. Took a deep breath. Drank some wine. More deep breaths. More wine. Then, girding up my loins, I pulled on some vinyl gloves, ventured back to the garage and dragged that box outside, kicking it a couple of times to see if anything was still sleeping in it. Nothing moved. I kicked it again, turned it around and there it was, the entrance the mouse had created. A small hole in the very bottom edge of the box, no larger than a golf ball. I kicked it again for good measure, then left it outside for about a week. It became a thing with me. I'd park my car in the drive and go in thru the garage door, giving the box a good kick as I passed it. No real reason, the mouse was clearly gone, but just because it felt good. Take that, mouse. I kicked your house. 

I have no idea what was in the rest of the box besides the one lampshade, the paper and the quilt. Trash pick-up day arrived and I picked up the entire box and put it into one of the trash bins. For all I know the bottom of the box was filled with 6 inches of Spanish doubloons. Don't know. Don't care. If my mom ever asks where her no doubt favorite lampshade is, I have no clue. 

The movers were super helpful in stacking my mom's stuff in my garage