My pile-sorting project at home was interrupted last week by three blessed days of work. Those three days away, however, helped me see my piles in a new way.
I’m the relief person for a mini-storage in Exeter, where I’m appreciated for my attention to detail despite the fact that I’m frequently late. I keep track of my tardy minutes and try to compensate for them, including staying past quitting time if a customer needs me. Saturday one did.
It was twenty minutes before closing. I was ready to go home and start facing my piles again when a woman flew through the door asking was I closed? "No,” I said, hoping she only wanted to make a payment. No, she wanted to rent a unit. “No,” involuntarily erupted from my mouth, then I asked what size she needed. “Do you have pictures of them, can I see one?” she asked back, semi-frantic as the story of her need began to pour out. “We can go look at some,” I told her, knowing this was going to take longer than twenty minutes. I silently said goodbye to my going home plans, silently acknowledged that I recognized her confusion, her state of disrepair, that I’d been there before myself. Determinedly I said “I can help you.”
Her story is not mine to tell, but it’s one we hear often in the mini-storage business. A person feels their life beginning to unravel, relationships turning to melted wax. Sometimes it’s divorce or the loss of a home; sometimes it’s death itself. The stuff of our existence, the things we’ve collected to make life good or bearable or creative are suddenly at risk. We need a safe place to put what remains of that life until this storm blows over. We rent a unit, buy a lock, and begin to sort what needs saving from what can go. Renting a unit can feel like finding a little eddy in a tidal wave of despair.
Sometimes taking a rental feels just right. A young couple came through the door Saturday morning wanting a place to store things they were collecting for their new house in Exeter. Our buy-one, get-one-free special served them perfectly, since escrow is supposed to close this week. They plan to paint walls and install new flooring, making the house theirs before they move in. I rejoiced in their stable lives and organization, their partnership in the decision-making.
A lot of the time, however, renting a unit to someone feels like triage. I can’t keep the bank from taking the house, can’t cure the cancer, can’t mend the marriage, can’t even promise their stuff will be totally safe while they work on the problem, however long that takes. All I can do is find the right-sized unit to fit their needs, walk them through the paperwork and obligations entailed, say a prayer, and say goodbye, good luck moving in. It leaves me feeling pretty helpless sometimes.
Mid-day a couple about my age came into the office looking tired. They had just finished cleaning out her mother’s unit, a 10x30, after her death in November. They had been working on it six weekends, had three yard sales, and paid someone to come take what was left. I congratulated them, knowing how painful it was, as well as exhausting. We’re just glad it’s done, they said.
After they left, I finished the paperwork and discovered that I had rented the unit to her mother a year before. I tried to remember the occasion, her face or story, what the weather was like, but it was all a blank. I went to clean the unit and found a few shards of her life left on the floor amidst the dust.
The scraps said she was a craftswoman, a person who loved to make things, uniting her spirit with the materials of this world. It’s a love I share, although I don’t give myself that pleasure much anymore. In a plastic bag I bundled up a few ceramic tiles, a window-shade pull, a piece of nylon webbing and a funeral program she’d saved since 1998, and tucked them in the back seat of my car, a salute to our shared humanity. Then I swept away the last of her mini-storage remains, making room for the next customer.
My piles look a little different now. I see that what’s in most of them are the remains of former lives, mine and others’: spirit-infused material goods whose time in our lives has expired. I can’t bring back my field work days any more than I can my once-sharp eyesight, though in remembering who I was back then I might find a compass for restoring my path. In that hope, I’m digging back in. See you later.
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Trudy
Wischemann is a fiber craftswoman who writes.
You can send her your thoughts about stuff c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA
93247 or leave a comment below.
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