Sylvia's Journal

For the last few weeks we have been dismantling a fully furnished rental unit next to our house. One renter, with his 2 daughters, moved out after 4 years, and 2 others are moving in by mid september. The latter didn’t want our furnishings as they have plenty of their own. We had just gotten back from a three week birthday celebration in Sweden (Axel turned 80 in the land of his ancestors) and woke up to this surprise, it was panic: 3 fully furnished bedrooms, a living and dining room, 2 bathrooms, a kitchen, a pantry, a mudroom and a finished basement had to be emptied. It was full of stuff. The fancy mid century modern furniture from West Elm our daughter had bought to furnish the place 6 years ago, was put up for sale but no one wanted to pay the hefty price tag. We decided to absorb and integrate the furniture in our household and that of our two daughters. And then there was all the other stuff: beds, linens, and the content of the pantry and kitchen cabinets. We invited friends, our landscaper and others to come and help themselves. Many items in the kitchen and pantry came from the people who had rented the apartment for 60 years before our last renters had moved in four years ago. When one of the very long renters died, during COVID, we had to let go of the other because the rent for this seaside property was so low that it didn’t even cover our real estate taxes.

That was the first major clean out and our first stressful experience with clean out, refinishing and refurbishing. The kitchen was extremely well equipped because the longtime renters had been gourmets (and yes, we have still have two bound volumes of ancient Gourmet Magazines). We cleaned up and left much of the cooking gear in place. Now, all these years later, we re-discovered all that, much of it unused because the last renters weren’t much into cooking. Our daughters and son-in-law came to help, rented a U-haul and carried things up and down stairs and eventually some of it to their own homes. We dismantled and re-assembled IKEA beds with the help of AI. We replaced some of our old New England pine furniture, that required two hands to pull out a drawer, with the fancy West Elm pieces (easily open a drawer with one hand). That meant emptying drawers, and what did we find there? Clothes not worn for a long time, toys not played with for years, old sheets, damaged things we were not able to throw out before. But now we are. We are in a different phase of our lives and are more able to say, “no, we won’t ever use or need this.” We already dropped off two carloads at the Thrift Store in Gloucester and they sent a truck to pick up furniture we had displaced or that had been hiding in dark places in our house or the rental.

At times all that giving away and throwing out brought up intense feelings of loss. We were both flooded with memories (“oh, that table, my mother had her tea service on it!”) or antiques that Axel’s mother had found all over New England, refinished and furnished her bedroom with. I loved that furniture, but it no longer fit and so we had to let it go.