Memories For Sale

I took today off to have a garage sale. I tend to get organized enough and collect enough stuff to have one once a year and I usually dread it. I think they are a lot of work for little return. Especially considering I usually take the money earned and buy stuff that I will probably sell at a future garage sale.

But I really dislike garage sales for sentimental reasons. Maybe it goes back to a garage sale I remember my mom having when I was probably 8 or 9. We sold my little pink bike with the white wicker basket. I'm sure I was too old for it - she wouldn't have sold it out from underneath me - but I remember vividly watch some other little girl push it down the driveway after her dad bought it for her. Maybe it has to do with the fact that I lived in the house I grew up in most of my life. We moved there when I was barely 5 and my mom lives there now. It was easy for me to store up many memories and mementos from my life there. Discarding them to make room for more memories wasn't necessary, literally and figuratively.

So anyway, over the past couple of weeks I've been gathering stuff to sell. Some of it was your basic garage sale fodder - old placemats, wall hangings, vases, CDs - but I had made up my mind to sell a lot of the boys' old stuff. I had kept bins and bins of clothes, socks and shoes in case we had another boy. (And looking through it the past week, it wouldn't have been quite fair handing it down to another child. Most of it was threadbare, stained or torn.) But when Abby arrived I knew it would be time to let go of it.

I found that really hard to do. I cried a few times yesterday as I moved teeny pajamas and socks, cutesy elephant sweaters and train t-shirts from their storage bins to the garage sale pile.

But today was even harder. I found myself really frustrated and annoyed by the people who rifled through the clothes. "Don't you know that's a pile of memories, not just clothes." Occasionally I would notice something I hadn't seen the day before and it was all I could do to not rip it out of the buyer's hand. "Sorry, that's not for sale." I sold the Baby Bjorn I used to take Sam for walks in, and I almost followed the woman to her car to tell her I'd changed my mind.

After a few hours and some decent money I decided to pack up and take the leftovers to Goodwill. That was even worse. The man at Goodwill took my storage bins and roughly tossed their contents into larger piles behind him. I started to panic a little. "What if in between those stained and faded t-shirts is the baby hat Sam wore home from the hospital? What if those are the pajamas Jake had on when he took his first step? Don't you know that those Christmas PJs have matching bottoms?"

And truly as I sit here my stomach is in knots and my eyes are full of tears. I feel like I threw away so many memories today. I don't know what good it would do to keep all the stuff around - we don't have the room and what good will it do to have the blue and red rugby shirts that Sam and Jake loved and wore to the pumpkin patch 3 years ago.

Don't get me wrong. I am not one of those obsessive horders you see on Oprah. My house isn't piled with newspapers I can't throw away (not intentionally anyway). It's just that I attach so much sentimental value to belongings. I picture Sam in that chambray shirt at Delta's birthday party when he threw up in the bounce house. I remember Jake in his Moses basket wearing that onesie.

I did keep a few things - some socks and favorite shoes, some of the baby clothes and some especially soft blankets I bought when I found out I was pregnant the first time.

And as I sit here I know that the memories should really be tied up in the moments, the milestones, the events, not the tangible reminders of those events. But, for what it is worth, I still grieve a little knowing someone else now has some of those reminders. And to them, they are just things they bought at a garage sale.