Oh my, it’s been a busy weekend chez nous. The Genealogist has a veritable bee in his bonnet for a mass cleaning of our basement which has been amazing. We have purged so much shit from our home over the past few weeks it’s just awesome. How we acquired so much shit? Seriously, I can’t even go there. I have made some excuses – oh, when we moved in we had a toddler! And then, a month or so later we found out we were expecting another baby! So OF COURSE things piled up!
But really? Come on. That was 13 years ago.
Anyway, we’re working through it all and it’s been a great accomplishment. But it also makes me cringe for the amount of stuff we have accumulated over the years. We have been making strides to reduce our consumption and reduce the amount of stuff we bring in to our home, but the stuff is still there.
I think the best thing we’ve learned from this experience is that stuff happens, and when you’re done with said stuff, you need to take care of it. Give it away, recycle it, put it on your front lawn so someone will take it, throw it out… ANYTHING. Just don’t – for the love of all that is holy – put it in your goddamned basement. Because 13 years later, you will spend a year trying to get rid of it.
So when we take our stuff to the recycling/garbage station, they have attendants to make sure you’re dumping the right stuff in the right dumpster, etc. And it occurred to me that if I was a transfer station attendant, I would probably have zero stuff to my name. Imagine watching car after car unload loads of crap to be landfilled or recycled or whatever.
Yesterday when we went, there was a queue to get to the dumping station. And once we were through, the queue got even longer. And the dumpsters got filled and emptied and filled again.
So imagine. Watching that kind of thing happen day in, day out. Wouldn’t that make you eliminate stuff from your life? Even just going there yesterday gave me the screaming heebie-jeebies and made me kind of disgusted in humanity that we all seem to have THAT MUCH CRAP to dispose of in dumpsters on a regular basis.
Then I started thinking, and hoping, that a lot of these people are like us. That this mass purging of stuff is the accumulation of a decade or more. That maybe a lot of these people are, like us, eliminating the stuff that we acquired and just didn’t have time to get rid of. That maybe our hearts grew 3 sizes that day! Or something.
At the very least I think it’s a good thing – purging is always a good thing. And I love my city for providing this service too. Goods are disposed of properly, and at a minimal cost. Recycling services are free, which encourages people to recycle, right? If it cost you to properly recycle your batteries and chemicals, you might just throw them into landfill. But it doesn’t, here in Hamilton. All you need to do is collect the stuff and bring it to the station, and they take care of it for you.
If that doesn’t make your heart grow 3 sizes, I don’t know what will.
The Urban Info Girl 