This could just as easily have been called “My Last 9 Months,” so herewith and after a long hiatus, my partial summary of the last 9 months is ready to hit the presses. I wrote some of this from the wilds of Ireland — the chilly, rainy and gray southwest coast — where the concept of summer is but a passing fancy, and users of antidepressants are legion. Before this immersion in moldy dankness, I had spent the previous three months sorting through my belongings, moving everything I wanted to keep to a storage locker, having an estate sale, and selling my house of 24 years. My intention during my long-awaited vacation was to relax, recuperate, and have some time to write. That did not come to pass, and is another story entirely.
The experts say that if you devote ten years working on any particular endeavor you’ll become an expert in that field. Although the not-so-small issue of talent is an essential ingredient in this concept, I’ll use the well known example of Sonny Rollins, tenor saxophone giant. Born in 1930, he began performing professionally in 1948, and only stopped playing a few years ago. For a couple of years beginning in 1959 he quit performing and practiced for hours every day on the Williamsburg Bridge in Manhattan, the first of several other “sabbaticals,” to try out new ideas and perfect his style. (At the time he lived next door to a pregnant neighbor whom he didn’t want to bother with his practicing.) Rollins was already a well regarded musician at the age of 29, but took several musical breaks in his life to experiment with ideas and work on his technique. This is a person whom one can, without discussion, call an expert in his field. I am by no means a Sonny Rollins kind of expert in anything but I have always loved the story of his Williamsburg Bridge practice sessions because it demonstrates such a tenacious desire to experiment and improve.
My recent packing-up-and-selling-the-house adventure, and my many moves during my life, allow me to offer a little advice on what was an emotionally intense and physically arduous experience, although fairly smooth in retrospect. I started in early March with the sorting and packing, the move to a storage locker, and then the hastily arranged estate sale in early April. A few days before and during the estate sale, I moved to kindly neighbors’ basement apartment up the street so I could be out of the house to let the estate sale people work their magic with pricing and set up. I flew back to the East Coast In mid-May, while my house interior was partially painted and “staged,” listed and sold. I flew back to Seattle for the house closing, put the last bits of my possessions into my storage locker, and was back on the East Coast by the end of May. By the end of June I was on my way with my husband to Ireland for 3 months.
Don’t let anyone tell you this sorting, packing, moving and selling experience is easy; it is a taxing process. I was reminded of all those women running around in 50s suburban America taking valium, keeping a lid on their anxieties and remaining calm under pressure, and thinking I could have used some sedative help along the way. Because I’ve been thinking about it for several years and mulling over different ways to go about the process of de-cluttering and downsizing, I knew, in theory, what had to be done but not exactly in what order or how. If you know you’re downsizing from a moderately large house to something smaller, something you have just purchased or rented, you have a much clearer idea of what you can fit in. If you don’t know where you’re moving to, you just have to decide what you really want to keep regardless of where you end up.
Sorting through and determining what you must keep and what you can part with is the tricky part. I became more ruthless as the clock ticked on, and started to feel a certain amount of joy and freedom in my new found ability to discard. If you have a scheduled moving date, you are compelled to finish sorting and packing in order to meet the deadline. For example, I was able to condense my thirty-three photo albums and about fifteen large manilla envelopes full of loose photos into a 6 x 10 inch file box, stacking photos on their edges. I went to the dump with the albums and other dumpables and flung them happily into the odorous pit. I sold at a seriously discounted price about 200 jazz, blues, and pop record albums plus my tapes and 45 records to a record store; I kept the CDs despite my son’s admonitions that I could listen to everything on Spotify or Amazon. I kept my favorite art and ethnic artifacts. I kept most of my lamps, one of my couches, most of my chests, a couple of coffee tables, many rugs, and dining room chairs. I disposed of my beds, my dining table, an enormous amount of china, and a truck load of kitchen things. I must have thought I would never cook, bake or entertain again. Clothes were easy to sort through and send back off to Goodwill from whence many of them came originally. The hardest things to let go of were most of my thousands of books, and the indoor plants and large potted outdoor plants, not to mention the garden itself. I decided that if nothing else, I could consider myself somewhat adept at getting rid of books, plants, china, furniture, rugs, clothes and art. Even so I made plenty of mistakes and regret some of my decisions.
Most everyone of a certain age has owned at least one tattered copy of Alex Comfort’s Joy of Sex and the Kama Sutra, Ginsberg’s Howl, Kerouac’s On the Road, Joyce’s Ulysses, Brautigan’s Trout Fishing in America, Cleaver’s Soul on Ice, Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique and so on. The progression from your college copy of Gide’s The Immoralist and Camus’ The Stranger to today’s diversions represent a timeline of your adult interests over the years and a good portion of your identity. You get used to their absence in time although I regret the loss of many. I occasionally look for certain books that I didn’t keep thinking I must still have them. The books I did keep were ones I intend to re-read or glance though in my dotage.
This is the time to practice realpolitik.
- Bring in the experts if you are able. Hire someone to pack everything you want to keep. Fortunately, I found a wonderful packer — he was fast as lightening, professional, pleasant, affordable, and got packing boxes for everything at cost.* If you can afford it, hire someone to dispose of books, and to help you determine what you should keep, give away or sell. Remember that many things you get rid of you’ll probably have to replace later on — garbage and recycling cans, dish rack, toilet bowl brush sets, shower curtains, beds, bookcases, chairs, tables, cookie sheets, glasses, bathroom items, pantry items, the list goes on. It is expensive to move and expensive to replace.
- Hire a moving company. A friend in the moving business gave me some recommendations, and I interviewed 4. The company I chose proved to be exceptionally reliable, affordable, pleasant, and fast. When they moved me from my storage locker to my new apartment, they came back twice to unpack boxes and dispose of boxes and mountains of paper.*
- Find a storage locker if you’re not sure where you’re going to end up. Your mover will be able to eyeball your packed boxes and furniture and tell you what size locker you’ll need. To protect art, books, rugs, and anything upholstered, you should have a climate controlled storage locker. Try to find one on the first floor. It’s much easier to move in and out if you don’t have to traipse down halls and use elevators. The newer self-storage businesses are more expensive but have more amenities.*
- After the bulk of your belongings have been moved to a storage locker, you will find that you still have to personally pack many more boxes of leftover items you overlooked — more books, your vacuum cleaner, last minute files, your ironing board and iron — and get it to the locker.
- Have an estate sale. There is a wide range of companies from high to low end, and they typically charge a hefty percentage — 35% — but their total take is closer to 50% of total sales when you include their other costs such as photography, pricing, organizing, hauling away everything that hasn’t sold, and moving heavy furniture from floor to floor. Be very clear about what they do for you and what they charge. Be very clear about what is and isn’t to be sold. An example: some items I intended to keep with the house disappeared — garden lights and a garden arbor firmly anchored in the garden with 4 vines growing over it. Ask how many people will be working the sale and monitoring exits to try to cut down on shoplifting (which is rampant). Limit the number of floors so that people won’t be tramping all over the house. After the sale is over, the company will then haul away anything that hasn’t sold and take it to a charity and the dump. I did not ask a lot of the right questions, particularly in regard to the money end. This is a result of having been brought up to believe that talking about money was in extremely poor taste, and I have suffered the consequences my entire life. After the last clear out, my house was practically empty except for the kitchen table and built in bench, my 3 suitcases, a few clothes, and a few kitchen and bath items.
- Sell your house. After the estate sale, I went out of town and my charming and very competent realtor moved in to take charge of the partial re-painting of the house interior, the staging, and making sure inspection requirements such as decommissioning the oil tank, some minor electrical cleanup in the basement, and earthquake proofing the hot water heater were fulfilled. My realtor went above and beyond in terms of handling several unusual and difficult issues. The house sold in a few days after listing, I came back to town, and the sale closed in 2 weeks. In a flash I was homeless in Seattle.*
A slight detour — the last movie I saw before the packer packed up my TV was the 1970 Bob Rafelson movie, Five Easy Pieces, with Jack Nicholson, Karen Black, and Susan Anspach, a movie highly acclaimed in its day but which I barely remembered. It feels dated and has not aged particularly well. Tammy Wynette’s “Stand By Your Man” heard at the beginning of the film says it all. The brutally funny scene in the diner is still brutally funny and Nicholson is very good in a supercilious kind of way, but Karen Black’s over the top impersonation of an uneducated cracker waitress with hurt feelings and a penchant for heavy makeup and chalky lips (a thing for a while in that era) is tiresome. In fact, all of the women, with the exception of Jack’s sister, are either dreamy, new agey types or frenzied, stupefied sexpots (including Sally Struthers in the twirling sex scene) — quintessential madonna/whore embodiments. The story, however, is all about Jack and his alienation from everything — work, women, his family, and music. The last scene where he literally rides off into the sunset (in a semi) is hilarious. Now that I have a functioning TV again, I plan to zero in on other older, overlooked films with renewed vigor and interest.
After the move and the sale, I decamped to Ireland for 3 months, living precariously out of a suitcase, fending off bats, mold, woodlice and an arthritic hip, but enjoying the “kindness of strangers” as Blanche DuBois would have it, and the hearty pleasures of soda bread. Despite your natural inclination to think that Irish food might be questionable, the fresh seafood, beef, and lamb were very tasty. Vegetables not so much. Many vegetables are flown in from distant shores — Egypt, Kenya, and EU countries — but have traveled too far and don’t hold up very well. Some desserts were excellent. The Irish adventure, however, warrants a lengthier description at a later date.
Upon my return to Seattle, I stayed at the home of very kind and helpful friends for 3 weeks while looking for an apartment. I looked at seventeen apartments, enduring some unhelpful and annoying millennial attitude along the way, but found an almost perfect place in the end. The move from my storage locker to the apartment took many hours, and I lost my wonderful 1972 red velvet couch in the process. It was too long to fit in the elevator, so I donated it to the condo association “party room,” and will visit it upon occasion. It has taken me almost 2 months to get things in place, but I feel quite comfortable here now and like my new neighborhood.
I have to thank many friends and my husband who provided shelter, transported boxes, uttered words of encouragement and doled out moral support. The last 9 months have been de-stabilizing but character building. What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger kind of thing.
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*I’ll be happy to give names and references for any of the above mentioned.