The Last Job

The Last Job

I was scheduled to start showing the house in two weeks. It was almost ready. The last bastion of clutter, the garage, because as I decluttered the house everything went there to be sorted. The middle, where a car would be if we’d actually used it as a garage, became the staging area for decisions. As rooms were done, the excess became “keep,” “give away,” “donate” or “trash.” I was vigilant at taking them to the appropriate places ASAP, except for the keepers.

It had been hard, suddenly everything was mine instead of ours. Suddenly I had to think about things I had not had to think about, because suddenly there was no “him” to think about them. Selling the house was an easy decision, I didn’t need this huge house. But then, as I began touching and dealing with things I had not given a thought to for forty-seven years, it became a sweet but painful journey. And now, our garage.

I looked around at this last job. So excited that it was the last, so overwhelmed at the magnitude of garage paraphernalia. Storage from forty years, boxes, tools, junk, leaves, abandoned nests, and spiders, of course. But at least it was the last job.

I dove right in, hauling everything away from the walls, starting my piles: toss, donate, keep... Oh! I remember this sign from when he decided to sell the old desk, nobody bought it. And the bird feeder he made that the birds refused to use. It drove him absolutely crazy, yet for some reason he had kept it.

This job that was supposed to take a couple days, was going to be a bit harder than I thought. I smiled, shrugged my shoulders and settled down to savor every precious minute.