Taking Ownership

I used to think that my father told me, "The things you own, end up owning you."

He didn't, actually. It's a line from "Fight Club," but my dad says things like that and it's been a thought in my head for ages.

Over the last couple of days, I've been doing a lot of cleaning and grooming --my realtors who may be reading could very well be shaking their head. I'm not the neatest guy anybody has met. I don't think of how I live as dirty, but I do gravitate toward cluttered.

I have a lot of books. Most of them will never get read because I am a devoted patron of my public library and usually lug about 25 pounds of books home every other week or so.

There have never been more than four coffee drinkers in this house at any one time. Yet, I have over a dozen coffee mugs. I also have a wide variety of kitchen gadgets. The good ones, like my Kitchenaid mixer, I use at least once a month. The crappy ones, like an Oster food chopper, I haven't used since George Bush was president --and like W., the only thing it regularly accomplished was making an impossible mess.

I keep clothes I can't wear any more and probably wouldn't wear if I could and somehow, some way. I have CDs from college, back when my musical leanings were even more suspect than they are now.

I have tax documents that go back 15 years and, inexplicably, fast food receipts from four years ago. How or why I kept them, I don't know.

The yard wasn't so great either. The previous owner installed several really cute garden beds and put in a couple of posts to hang flags --he also put a big wooden cross six feet from the front door. You could probably display a banner to let the King know the knights of the round table were welcome to stop by --maybe-- but it looked like a big cross to me; not quite big enough to crucify a full-grown man, but certainly a dwarf or elf.

I'd never liked the thing, but in three years I'd also done nothing about it.

I'd also done next to nothing to maintain the flower beds. Oh sure, I talked a nice game when it came to my vegetable garden out back, but I'd let the tiger lilies and the rag weed battle it out on their own in the front. If the rose bush wanted to make a play for the driveway --I could care less.

But now that I wanted to sell the place, it was brought to my attention that I needed to care. I needed to care that I was quietly becoming a hoarder and that my yard was becoming a jungle fun land and future nesting ground for snakes and prehistoric reptiles.

"Babe," my girlfriend said. "You have to show people the possibility. It doesn't have to be perfect..."

But it needed to be better than it was. I had to give them a reason to want to live here.

In the first week, I removed six leaf bags of yard waste. The week after that, I did six more. The week after that, I felt guilty about the amount of extra trash I was leaving for the waste management company and tossed four bags, plus a couple of boxes full of stuff from the house into a dumpster --plus I left two bags for the truck.

This week, I left out eight bags.

They took two.

Bastards.

Over the last couple of days, I've washed floors, scrubbed counters and thrown away all kinds of things I didn't even really remember I had. I've stumbled across papers and memories, some of them unpleasant --there's nothing like re-reading a letter written nervously from jail or finding that last birthday card your grandma sent you when her handwriting looked so weak or half a dozen other things that we keep that we never mean to, but don't discard because it means having to look at them one more time.

Some of them had owned me, but they were all just the ghosts of ghosts; not even proper haunts, but what was left over when the spirit had moved on --practically nothing.

I threw it all out and then told the realtor I was ready to put the house on the market.