Thursday, August 30, 2007
Some years ago my mom drove by a neighbor’s house and turned around. It couldn’t be. No one would throw that in the trash.
She parked, examined it, knocked on the door, and quickly learned it was indeed trash, and that she could have it. And that’s how a Styrofoam reindeer head as large as a bathtub became a part of our home for a generation.
My father fashioned a grand mount for it. It was painted silver, then gold, then placed high above the living room TV. Mom decorated the reindeer for two graduations, a wedding and countless holidays in between. When I say decorated, I mean decorated: ornaments, bouquets, graduation caps, bunny ears, Mardi Gras beads—you name it.
Today, the reindeer waits patiently, unadorned in climate-controlled storage until it finds a new home. It is no longer trash. It is stuff—and stuff worth keeping.
My parents spent two months this year boxing up a family’s worth of acquirements, downsizing our long-time Baton Rouge home into a fifth-wheel motor home. We’ve had to learn to divide our memories and objects into piles: garage sale, trash or long-term storage. It wasn’t all trash, but all stuff, although most of it not worth keeping. Who really needs an inflatable zebra? I guess we did.
My parents taught us trash isn’t always trash. Mostly, it’s recycling. Sometimes it’s potential soil. Other times it’s stuff (sometimes worth keeping, sometimes entirely frivolous).
And of course, there’s always the chance it could become someone else’s decoration-ready Styrofoam reindeer.
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