The garage was fucked. The garage, that dumping ground for all our excess, for all we could not process or endure. The garage was the physical manifestation of our gluttony and waste. The garage was bombastic in scale: a proud boat slapped on the face of our mint-green suburban home. The garage would hold three cars but with such vertical height, past owners had built a set of upstairs lofts, creating the effect of four chambers. Because it had spiders and bad smells and was dark I endeavored to make the garage my own, like the den. I adorned it with rock posters and tapestries, a throwback to old dorm rooms and apartments. But with everyone’s things crammed in the garage the space was fucked. Like the chambers of a heart it was clogged.

I had a set of vintage bookshelf speakers rigged to an old stereo and music sounded especially good in the garage. The more dank and gritty, the better. Like Captain Beefheart’s Trout Mask Replica or anything by the band Can. Neutral Milk Hotel sounded good too, on cassette. The form factors, cassette or CD, were all original so that was an added benefit. It was like a horcrux, fragments of my soul anchored to these prized physical objects.

We had not reconciled the garage since the lead-up to our nine-month tour of Europe that started 10 years ago this week. The garage was now an overgrown garden choked by weeds. Unwanted things gone amok, mostly the kids’ things.

I commandeered Lily to reconcile her stuff by pulling all the bags and boxes down to the bottom chamber, so they might be judged in the light of day. I threw open the bay doors and blew it out with the leaf blower. And then I got a foldout chair and sat with her as Lily went through it all. She found a necklace with a coyote tooth she made in wilderness therapy, also a photo album from that same era. So naturally the hard part of all this is the nostalgia, the cloying feelings of the past, confronting all we may not have the space or energy to confront (which is why we have the garage).

I emptied a bag of my old T-shirts, so many things I’d forgotten I had. Same with the art: old pictures we’d hung in past houses, now buried in the upstairs loft. Board games from long-gone Saturday nights, unplayed records with faded covers: it could choke you too.

I backed our Honda Pilot by the mouth of the garage so we could just load anything for donation right into it. From one container to another. Lily worked at the thrift store down the road, the same one we would donate her things, and wouldn’t it be funny if she wound up having to process and price her own stuff, we joked?

It didn’t take more than a couple hours. Soon Charlotte joined in, and started with her Barbie dolls. You could see a kind of melancholy settle in and I felt maybe I was being mean, making them do this. Part of me wanted to say “you can keep anything you want,” but Dawn pointed out the foolishness in that. I did suggest to Charlotte she save some of her favorites in case she has kids some day; she hadn’t thought of that.

And when they were done I was surprised by how I felt: not as much joy and relief but more a melancholy too, that all our stuff could disappear so quickly. I didn’t feel the joy of reclaiming our space, it just felt emptied. It was not only a manifestation of all our gluttony and waste, the garage was a keeper of the past, and held lots of our love and memories too. You could haul it all up the road, unload it, and be back in 15 minutes. That felt surprisingly real. Like moving out, or moving on.

Categories: Creative Nonfiction, Memoir

Tags: aging, Creative Nonfiction, Memoir, Nostalgia, parenting