Imagine No Possessions ...

For the less sprightly house mover, the TENS machine is advisedly one of the things you pack into your handbag, for easy access, after you've driven across town on a Sunday night, from the old B suburb to the new B suburb with a car packed to the scuppers full of all those last minute things - buckets and mops and the clothes airer and piles of shoes, and the disbelief that you have actually finished moving.

Moving house is one of those wormholes that you fall into and are against all logic scared that you will not fall out of again.  This is why at 4 o'clock I stood crying in the middle of the empty-but-for-the-giant-dust-bunnies-in-the-corner lounge room, with the end in sight but feeling like it would never come.

Susie is a tired girl.  Post-CFS terrors mean that each of the past two mornings I have opened an eye and gingerly moved my body and wondered if this is called post-exertional payback.  However, I think this is just called really-bloody-aching-muscles.

I did a tip run.  This is the first time I have been to the tip since I was a child.  I have an active distaste for throwing away stuff, not so much becuase I am a hoarder but because my Western consumerist guilt twists my gut into cords.  So it took me by surprise on Sunday's tip run to also feel immense pleasure and satisfaction alongside the guilt.  I think the guilt probably even added to the pleasure of backing up the car, opening up the hatch, and flinging stuff over the edge into the pit.  It is hard to fling an old CRT computer monitor, admittedly.  It makes a gratifying smash when it hits the ground below, however.  Easier to fling was the old, badly-framed mirrored picture that nobody took from Freecycle.  Guilt at my old Granny's wine rack lying down there in the pit.  She's long dead, I have no use for it, nobody wanted it on Freecycle, but it looked small and sad sitting there in the pit until the giant man in the giant scooper pushed it all away.  There is such a poignancy about discarded things.

"Imagine no possessions.  It isn't hard to do," has been drifting through my mind all weekend.  The thought of living with no possessions has been a wonderful one as I've packed up stuff into boxes that now sit in my new house in giant mounds, waiting to be redistributed.  I realise, at this end, that whilst I have been good at getting rid of stuff, that I could have got rid of a whole lot more.  And that I shall continue to do so.

I have been gripped by the Freecycle bug.

The joy of putting things on there - juice extractors and dining chairs and pine hutches and a mound of bras that don't fit anymore, an enormous box of books - and then people turn up at your front door to take them!  Coolness.

What I didn't give away on Freecycle, I punted on the nature strip.  It was the second-last port of call before the tip run.  It is truly amazing what people will take away from your nature strip.  Things I didn't think anyone would want, like the crappy old outside chairs with paint splatters all over them, and the awful uncomfortable bar stool that my brother got from someone else's nature strip a year or so ago.  But they went within a couple of hours putting them outside.  The rocking chair that once belonged to my now-gone aunt (insert guilt here), the dining room table, my old bed.  All moved on to somewhere new.