Stuff

It’s an eight-hour drive south from Auckland to Wellington.

642km.

Plenty of time to think about my father-in-law’s passing and the

sad, empty shell of a house that had once been his home.

Empty of love and laughter and the memories that curl like wallpaper

in the corners.

But not empty of stuff.

Material stuff. The stuff that you accumulate and curate and hoard and say

“that’ll come in handy one day”.

It never does. It just sits in boxes and jars, in cupboards and closets.

Stuff.

Like geological layers, each strata telling it’s own tale.

Births, weddings, deaths, insurance forms, recipes torn from the Woman’s Weekly. So many knives and forks! And how many hammers does one man need?

And now it was time for a geological dig.

A clearing of the strata of stuff.

A Garage Sale.

In North America, it’s a Yard Sale; in UK, a Jumble or Boot Sale.

Here, in New Zealand, it’s called a Garage Sale.

Same concept.

The Sale of Stuff.

Although, as I found out, the meaning can be lost in translation.

A Pakistani neighbour of my father-in-law, on seeing the hand-painted ‘Garage Sale’ sign, wished to know why I was selling the garage, and how much I wanted for it!

“I’m just selling the stuff that’s in the garage.”

A van pulled up to the garage door, earlier than advertised.

Such is the way with Garage Sales.

Early bird gets the worm. Vultures circle?

He quickly assessed the many wooden boxes jumbled with tools and nuts and bolts. The old power tools and the jars of widgets and what-nots.

“Whaddya want for the lot?”

“The lot?”

Yeah, I’ll take everything. Whaddya want?”

I had anticipated a full day of haggling.

A day in which many people would arrive at my Garage Sale and thoughtfully pick over the remnants of my father-in-law’s life.

I had braced myself for the emotional roller-coaster that the sale of each individual item would entail.

The memory of him doing this with that, and that with this.

Now, at 8am on a sunny Sunday in Karori, Wellington, standing in that cluttered garage, I’m asked..

“So, whaddya want?”

It took my father-in-law 93 years to collect all this stuff.

But only a minute to get rid of it.

“500 bucks?”

A handshake, a van load, an empty garage.

Which matched the emptiness I felt.

I drove 642km north.

And all the way back, all I could think of was …

stuff.