Don’t Do This to Your Kids!

I looked out over more than 100 Matchbox toys and vintage 50s toys spread throughout our living room and kitchen, filling up every available surface, and realized that we were finally, 9 years later, at the end of what amounted to years and years of working our way through all of the dreck that had accumulated in my in-laws’ basement during their lifetime. Thankfully, some of those items might result in a bit of financial compensation coming our way, but that was preceded by several truckloads of stuff hauled away by Junkluggers (god bless them), trips to the dumpsters at night, boxes being hauled or stored with us through several moves, and hours and hours and HOURS spent sorting out the remaining boxes, researching what we had, figuring out if a box of coins would amount to anything and if so, how in hell did we find that out, and soooo much more. The hours needed to go through all of this has made me a bit obsessive about clearing out things that we personally have accumulated, removing this task from our own future generations.

Talking to friends, it seems that most of us grew up with parents of the depression, hoarders of the best kind, intent on ensuring that there would be things left for us to inherit and absolutely no way to run out of items that might, potentially, carry us through another financial disaster. Again, god bless them. They had our best interests at heart. Unfortunately, most of us have very little free time to go through boxes these days, search the internet for possible buyers, investigate the background of potential auctioneers, sort out who’s coming to take this stuff away, and if so, what is entailed in them doing so. I wish I did. Those little cars became quite intriguing and yet I was glad to see them taken away by our auctioneer. I knew that I was closing in on a new obsession and what little free time I had in the evenings was being spent searching for the variations in color of a particular Superfast car, or seeing if the truck we owned was, indeed, the one with the red hook and not the white one. And I’m not even a car fiend!

Our original storage room prior to now has been the size of a small room. Now, we hope to make do with a 4×4 space, fingers crossed. That is, if my husband can tear himself away from the boxes of magazines and memorabilia and hats and sports gear that he, himself, has accumulated. Like father, like son. Sigh.