Paying someone to take my junk away

Some individuals try really hard to clear their mind and get rid of their unique junk; their psychological and emotional junk.  They will go to yoga, they will meditate, they will do needlepoint, they will run fast and hard, they will kickbox, they will abstain from all gluten or they will quickly write up a to-do list. There are those that take their physical junk and lay them out on the front yard for others to pick through.  Those piles are veritable junk zoos for people to peer in, using some kind of special x-ray vision that finds gems in deep hipster-buckets.  I just paid someone to take my junk away. Literally.

I found all my worn out televisions, bookcases, shoes and bits of muse. They were all placed on the front porch and they were taken away by a couple of guys with an entrepreneurial spirit.  What an amazing service to receive in New York. You comb through your house in search of all those things that create too much clutter and just take up too much space in the small confines New Yorkers call home.

I paused for a moment and watched the pile of junk on my porch. It was like I was caught in the middle of a still life painting. The junk was beautiful in it its monstrosity. These were tired, battered inanimate objects that had long stopped being useful. Yet, these objects were a part of my house’s landscape and memory. Therein in that pile was my dog’s crate filled with his old chewed up toys. He died two years ago and yet his toys, his hair and his spirit were still in that basement pile up. Two crates as a matter of fact. Those were the crates I had once used to take him to my job for a week many years ago when he was recovering from an operation. I couldn’t work from home but didn’t want him to be alone. Thus, to my office he went. Which really didn’t help his recovery as he was so excited to be at work with so many people. He was a people dog and a bit of a ham.  Thus, he would put on a show. He could sing and dance. Oh yes, he could.   These crates were not junk. No they were not. However, I could no longer hold onto chewed up broken dog toys that no longer had a dog to drag them around.

In another part of the junk pile-up were a couple of old exercise machines.  I still exercise religiously every day. I just couldn’t do these machines anymore due to lack of physical space and boredom with those particular exercises. I now had an elliptical to accompany my treadmill. My old machines required more extensive use of my hands which I need to be free while I exercise in order to answer emails and text. Yes, I text a ton while exercising.  A work colleague was once startled to learn that the whole time we were texting about work I was on the treadmill. I outgrew my old exercise machines because they did not allow me to continue to be a workaholic. Sigh.

Old television sets, scan machines, shoes and old shelves rounded out the rest of the junk pile with numerous other odds and ends. Off they went into a truck, carted away by strangers, to be dumped into some larger garbage pile. What happens to all our garbage? Gone and forgotten? Crushed and buts of rubble. At the end of the day we do not take it with us. However, the memories remain deep in our being. We can tap into those memories when we need to. Sadly, yet healthily, we do move on. Or should. I can move on while someone else takes away my junk.

PS. This post was written with the the Alphabet Soup Daily challenge in mind.  The first paragraph word’s have all the letters of the alphabet.