Love It and List It

My practically perfect house is more than perfect. It is flawless. I am sitting in my beautifully staged living room, enjoying the clean, airy feeling of a place that is ready to “show.” And it will be shown, tomorrow, I hope, before my strategically placed flowers begin to wilt.

I, in contrast, am feeling curiously revived. Something in my mind has turned. It was gut-wrenching to begin with, but now the work is done. I’ve distributed half my belongings to people whose lives are now happier for owning them. And I am happier for letting them go.

The yard sale was the hardest thing. I picked up my possessions one by one, and weighed their importance in my hands. What special student gave me that mug? What occasion does this cheap picture frame commemorate? Wasn’t that my grandparents’ coffee table? Do I really need that extra bookshelf?

I discovered a disturbing reluctance to part with objects that I didn’t particularly like, just because I associate them with people that I do like. And I discovered a corresponding reluctance to part with objects that may be useful in the future, even though they haven’t been useful (not even once) for the last eight years. I discovered that I hold on to some items simply because I like the idea of owning them, even if I never bother to look at them. And then there are the other objects – the ones that I associate with my happiest memories, and use and appreciate each day. These are the hardest of all to let go.

It was difficult to put the first few treasures out for public consumption. It was even trickier to try to assign them a dollar value. But then a few things started to happen. First, I felt a thrill of sweet victory every time someone got suckered into buying something that was, essentially, useless – like the CD burner that was clearly marked “Sometimes Works,” or the cordless phone with the openly finicky battery. Second, I felt a swell of goodwill every time someone walked away appreciatively with something I had (or had not) treasured, like that jean jacket that looked much better on the motorcycle chick than it ever had on me. Third, I felt a growing sense of relief as the tables on my driveway began to clear. Things were opening up.

There were a few distressing moments, like when a woman urged her dog to sniff out my childhood teddy bear, and threw it in the air for him to carry away in his slobbering jowls (apologies to the dog-lovers out there, but that’s just not what my teddy bear is for). And then (can you imagine?) she had the audacity to ask me to dispose of her bag of dog sh*t in the garbage can I was trying to sell (because “it’s getting too heavy to carry,” she said).

But in the end I parted with things I had no intention of selling when I started out; and I collected a nice little pile of cash to spend on my first weekend excursion to, say, Spain (somehow, the teddy bear’s imminent decapitation was made more palatable by this little fantasy). And once I got over the yard sale hump, a heady inertia drove me relentlessly from clutter to clean. My belongings rained down on the delighted kijiji community. I gave away 16 boxes of books (because the kijiji community isn’t really into theology, I discovered), and I put seven bags of outdated files on the curb to be recycled. Eventually I got to the point where I started putting things into the give-away box simply because I couldn’t be bothered to find a spot for them elsewhere. My hard-working friends at the Re-Source Thrift Shop found themselves suddenly inundated with carloads of my stuff. All over the city, people are happily sporting my clothes, reading my books, burning my candles and hanging my curtains. It’s a windfall, Peterborough! And what a deal!

But the windfall is really mine – and I don’t mean the envelope of cash for Spain. I mean that I am free of these things that I clutched to myself for no good reason other than to know that they were there. And I am free to move among the objects that I have kept, knowing that there is more than one way to determine what they’re really worth.

Value, you see, is not just about quality or cost, as the retail industry would have us think. There is also value in space. When an object leaves my hands, a lovely emptiness replaces it, and liberates my hands to reach in other directions. When a piece of furniture leaves my house, the whole room opens up. That bare spot becomes a place of possibility. It gives me room to move things around, try different arrangements, hang a work of art – or, if I prefer, to leave the spot completely empty and simply place my feet where they couldn’t walk before. There is value in that; more than the value for the buyer, who now clutches something on my behalf; more than the value of the metal in my pocket. It’s the value of movement, of change, of serenity, of freedom.

And now I sit in my gorgeous living room, and I sense the space around me, and I feel good. I signed the papers today to put this particular paradise “on the market,” and make it someone else’s. I truly hope that it will “fit” its new owner like my jean jacket fit that biker chick, and that my cherished dwelling won’t just be tossed to the (figurative) dogs. I also hope I will get my asking price, because one likely needs more than coinage to really do Spain justice.

But I know now that the house’s true value, at this point in my life, is the space that it will give me to move on. I am bound to nothing. I can’t begin to envision what my world will look like two, or five, or ten years from now. I could be anywhere – and that’s where I belong. The real paradise is in the space beyond my view.