I recycle, repurpose, upcycle—basically, if it can be glued, painted, or turned into a questionable piece of home décor, I’m your girl. I’ll do anything to keep stuff out of the landfill. Noble, right? With that said… I currently have 4600 square feet of what some might call “treasure” and others might call “a cautionary tale” crammed in my basement. My three-car garage is stuffed like a Thanksgiving turkey. The cars live outside now. They know their place.
Every closet in the house is bursting at the hinges. Sometimes I feel like I’m living in a live-action episode of Hoarders R Us—minus the mystery feces and three-year-old tuna sandwiches. Although, I did once find something fuzzy in my daughter’s toy box that I thought was a dead mouse. I screamed like I’d just seen spider and called my dad downstairs. He took one look, casually picked it up (while I dry-heaved in the corner), and said, “Looks like a sandwich.” I’m sorry, what? I almost threw up all over my newly scrubbed floor.
People are always giving me stuff. I’m not sure if they genuinely believe I can turn it into a gold mine, or if they just don’t feel like dragging it to the dump themselves. Either way, this is one of those stories—starring one lazy human, a vacuum, and my ex-husband. Buckle up.
So one day, my ex-husband (emphasis on ex) shows up with a Kirby vacuum cleaner that someone at work gave him. “It still works!” he says, all proud like he brought me a puppy or a diamond ring. It was an older model, but it looked decent…until I unzipped the bag cover. No bag. Just...the ghost of everyone else’s skin cells who’d ever vacuumed a carpet. I’m talking straight-up DNA soup. If I said it was “nasty,” that’d be a compliment. I tossed it into the back of the truck and hauled it to the dump like a bad habit. Good riddance.
Fast forward a couple days. I take the 150-step walk to my dad’s house to say hi. Donna tells me he’s been puttering in the shop. I find him out there, eyes sparkling like he just found buried treasure. “Come in, come in! Sit down!” he says, like he’s about to unveil a cure for arthritis.
He disappears down to the lower level of the shop, then comes back up beaming. “Look what I got! Some lazy ass threw this brand new vacuum away! Probably just didn’t want to change the bag!”
I slowly turn my head. Cue horror movie music. I know that vacuum. “Hey… that’s MY vacuum!”
He laughs as I tell him the tale of how I’d acquired and then dumped it like a hot potato. I demand it back—obviously. He grins and says, “Oh, I just sold it for twenty bucks! Works great! All it needed was a good cleaning.”
A cleaning. That’s all. Twenty bucks. And I’m the environmentalist here?!
We spent the rest of the day at his shop, sitting with a giant bowl of old keys between us. For hours we brainstormed brilliant ideas for those keys—art projects, wind chimes, maybe a weirdly menacing necklace. Spoiler: we didn’t do a damn thing. But the keys are safe. I think. They’re either in the garage, the basement, or possibly the upstairs closet… no, wait—maybe under the bed? I’ll find them. Someday. Probably when I’m looking for something else entirely. Like my sanity.
No comments:
Post a Comment