All is rubbish

Vanity, vanity, all is vanity, saith the preacher. Except if he were knocking around the western world today, I think it would be, "Look at all that crap you're hoarding." Because that's one of the incidental, sobering lessons I've been learning from preparing to move overseas.

We've never been big consumers - that's partly how we saved enough to afford to start over in Europe. It's a standing joke that when I'm feeling despondent, I cheer myself up by throwing stuff out (it works every time). The lady we asked to run an estate sale for us nearly turned us down because we were "minimalists" and barely had enough to sell (referring to almost the entire contents of our house). We were so into zero waste - recycling, reducing, composting - that we only put our giant wheelie bin (garbage can) out once a month because we thought we ought to, even though there was only a bag or two rattling around in the bottom.

Now we're getting ready to move, and somehow the bin is full to overflowing every week (often with stuff left over for the next week) - and that doesn't include items we're not shipping, because everything that isn't broken past mending is going in the estate sale. Where is it coming from?

Well, for a start, recycling has gone out of the window with showing the house, because we don't have a kerbside service, and we can no longer store bags of rubbish in the side room until we get time to drag it off to the blue bins across town. Ditto composting for similar aesthetic reasons. Piles of paper and cardboard that wait around for cold days, when they warm us up via the woodburning stove. Years of garden rubbish dotted here and there over 1 1/2 acres, now slowly making its way to landfill. Scraps of this and that you keep just because you don't feel like throwing them out yet (half pieces of paper only scribbled on one side, stuff for 'crafts', the pens that don't work and the pencils that break every time you try to sharpen them). Anything that is beyond mending, but we've been hanging on to in some belief that we'll wake up one day knowing how to fix it. Using up everything in the store cupboard, including all those 'emergency' prepackaged foods (as long as they're reasonably in date). And all the stuff that brownies must be delivering during the night, because I can't see how else it can be this dire.

My only consolation is that we're at least consuming less new stuff while we wait to move. And it's reassuring to know that if a zombie apocalypse had come to Starkville, MS, we would have been in good shape for a while. But most of all, I've got a steel-hard resolution not to accumulate stuff in our new home (it'll be half the size, so that'll help) so that I never have to look at my life again and see all that rubbish.