My shopping addiction
I used to have a serious shopping problem. Acquiring stuff thrilled me, especially when I got a good deal. When I was in law school and broke, I satisfied my urge to buy things by getting up early on Saturday mornings and going “yardsailing” as we called it. My friend David and I would peruse the yard sale listings in the newspaper’s classified section (the actual paper version!) and circle the sales that looked most interesting and map out a strategy of conquest. After a few months of yardsailing, we knew which neighborhoods usually offered the best stuff and which neighborhoods, usually the more upscale ones, were occupied by cheapskates trying to sell old, mangled Tupperware and boxes of shoes worn all the way through the soles beyond repair.
I owned the perfect yardsailing mobile, a silver 1984 Volvo Station Wagon, that I’d bought for a mere $900. Though it was not a fuel-efficient car, the cargo bay could easily hold an entire dresser and some end tables with knick-knacks squeezed along the sides. In fact, one of my best finds was an old dresser that probably hadn’t been very expensive even when it was new. I think the sellers would have paid me to take it away. Instead, I bought it for $5, painted it a lovely mossy green, replaced the knobs with novelty pulls (which cost $60!) and used it as a sideboard and storage space in my dining room for years and it garnered lots of compliments. When we moved from that house, I took off the expensive newer knobs and replaced the original ones back on the drawers and sold the dresser at our own yard sale for $10.
I hadn’t been to a yard sale in years until this summer at the beach when my friends and I were riding our bikes to grab lunch on a hot August day. We stopped at a yard sale along the way when we spotted leaning against the side of the house one of those huge vintage wooden surfboards that was so slow and floatie that you could practically knit an entire scarf on it while riding a long, slow wave. He wanted several hundred dollars for the beautiful board and wouldn’t budge on the price, and I don’t blame him, though I think his wife lurking in the background was willing to negotiate. While I was stalling for time to haggle down the price of the board, I found a gorgeous sheep’s wool coat snuggled within a rack of old t-shirts that probably belonged to his wife. The tag said $20. A really good price and it fit me perfectly but it was about 98 degrees outside and I just wasn’t in the mood to buy wool. As I was walking away from the board as a negotiating tactic, the man shouted after me, “How about $5 for the coat?” I handed him a fiver before the wife could object, stuffed it in my bike basket, pedaled swiftly, and it’s been a staple of my winter wear ever since.
After a while, all this buying and selling old stuff became tiresome and eventually I just wanted to simplify my life and get rid of everything. Don’t get me wrong, I still get a small thrill out of acquiring something new. I’m a collector at heart. Especially art. And I have a weakness for beautiful, colorful dresses that stand out from the crowd. Also books. I buy a lot of books, and I have to have the actual books themselves in hand because I like flipping back and forth through the pages and the physical act of turning a page. But mostly, I just want to get rid of my stuff. I have been decluttering my physical life of everything nonessential and unattractive and useless and I think relinquishing the unnecessary objects has been a good metaphor for ridding my inner life of excessive baggage.
