Storage Units and Past Lives

Funny thing about emptying storage units, nothing looks like you exactly remember. It looks dingy, faded- ratty. The memories you have from each item-be it furniture, vase, photograph, or Christmas ornament don’t really match up.

I cleaned mine out over the last week and frankly I’m amazed I paid to have it stored for so many years. Circumstances change. Life changes. Jobs change. Suddenly you find yourself no longer needing or wanting all those precious antiques and teacups you’ve collected over the years. I realized I have a lot of teacups and teapots and brunch plates and, and, and. I have a silver tea service and two restaurant size chafing dishes. I have place settings for twelve and brunch plates for thirty. I live in a condo and have for the last ten years, but I’ve paid for the storage of these precious treasures “just in case” I ever needed or wanted them again.

I don’t need them. I don’t want them. Don’t get me wrong there are some things I missed-that certain set of rye whiskey glasses from the 1920’s, my Pappagalo rain coat from college, Grandmother’s cast iron skillets, all of which I have rescued and stuffed into the already bulging condo. All the other stuff I gave away or threw away and it felt good.

The process of sorting didn’t feel good. For an entire week I was forced to relive my life-all of it. Forced to stand in a dusty, hot, square cell and face my life all at once with no filters, praying there weren’t spiders in the boxes. There were spiders, but they were mostly mummified dried out husks of their scary, former selves-much like the items in the boxes.

I found my 4-H trophy from winning the state speech contest. It was plastic and the gold was peeling off. I found old prom pictures-what was up with the hair I will never know. Funny, I thought I looked so chic. Anyway, I found my high school scrap book-none of us look like that anymore. I know because I see them on Facebook. We are all on second and third marriages now and we look tired through the feigned smiles as we post with drinks in hand and sunsets in the background.

I found my album collection. Boy I was a nerd. I still am. My entire collection consisted of Barry Manilow, Neil Diamond, Barbra Streisand, and vintage Frank Sinatra albums I found in a thrift shop. That’s something I probably shouldn’t even be telling.

The contents of the boxes were perplexing- a jumbled hodgepodge of my kid’s baby pictures and my grandmother’s silver service in a plastic bag. I can’t remember all those many years ago how they ended up in the same box. I guess it doesn’t matter since they belong to the same life.

I found the enormous, obligatory photos of my children on their first birthday. What we moms would have done without the Sears photography studio I don’t know. We had no trendy photo studios imitating Anne Geddes-over and over and over again. Nope, there was a little wooden chair, a creepy stuffed bear, and a washtub with a rubber ducky. That was it. I got the ginormous photo with a free frame since I ordered package D with 400 itty-bitty little photos I cut out and sent to distant relatives and friends in Christmas cards. The other 367 are still in my packing boxes.

I found church directory family portraits with bad hair, shoulder pads, cute kiddos, and ex-husband. Well, that was awkward. What does one do with these? You feel guilty if you ditch them, but who in the world wants to be reminded of miserable failures and years of hostility and angst. I threw them away. It was too much to think about.

My current and forever husband and I closed down two houses and a Key Largo condo over the years and just kept shoving stuff into the, “pits of hell” as I have come to refer to it. That was even more awkward. As we reused packing boxes and moved stuff from one place to the next it seemed we never scratched out the boxes’ previous contents or last name. What initially held “baby blankets” with one last name now held pots and pans with a different last name. Those boxes resembled an Ellis Island ledger.

I suppose it is fitting that all those names and all those belongings were packed up, jumbled together, seeking better times under new names, with new spellings, stacked one on top of each other as though we were passengers on ships headed to the America, and the detritus of our collective pasts became the great melting pot of our lives.