My husband and I had a really hard talk. This didn’t happen overnight, it has been a long time coming. Neither of us are good at goodbyes, but we realize we just can’t keep doing this anymore.

We have to just let go.

We are having a garage sale!

This epic event has been 7 years in the making. I am having a hard time letting go. I horde clothes.  How do I price the shirt I wore when the firefighter and I had our first kiss? 87 billion dollars won’t fit on the little dot price stickers.  But those tiny shirts can only be worn as a neck scarf these days (and the past 6 1/2 years worth of days).  I had totes of clothes marked “pre pregnancy”, “pre pre pregnancy”, and “pre pre pre pregnancy”.  So when I tell you I am wearing my “pre pregnancy jeans” (whilst sporting an impressive muffin top) please know I am not referring to the jeans I wore on my honeymoon, but the ones I wore after bearing  2 of our children.

Weird things have happened to my body. So shorts that do not cover the strange network of veins mapping my life’s journey and bizarre craters on the back of my legs have no business being in my dresser.  The other day I had to reach for something super high at the grocery store and Zeke asked me about a billion questions about what he had just seen.  White lines on my belly? Stretch marks from Connor and Amelia. Weird belly button? Umbilical Hernia from Zeke. Slight(a rare understatement in my writing) overhang? Lets call it excess roominess from those tiny humans who were looking at my belly with disgust. Therefore, shirts that do not cover at least half of my tush are no longer allowed in my closet.

My husband hordes things, too. Just in case. We have three lawn mowers. One that works, two that do not, but are available for tinkering with just in case our working mower quits.  He has duplicates of his duplicate tools, just in case.  He has 4 pairs of boots and dislikes them all. He buys jeans, wears them once (just long enough to get them dirty) and decides they weren’t meant for working in and have therefore been relegated as closet space utilizers.  I bought and put together a vacuum cleaner recently.  I used it twice. The firefighter insisted we keep the broken one, just in case.  Well, when we started cleaning out closets and storage, he found the old vacuum cleaner and fixed it.  We are now selling the new one.

We have stuff from before we had stuff that we bought so we would look like we had stuff. Stuff that we bought at second hand shops so our book case wouldn’t look so sad.  Our first apartment had a fireplace so we bought stuff to stick on the mantle. We are selling 94 candleholders, if anyone is interested.

We have martini glasses, though we have never had a martini. If it didn’t come in a can we ain’t drankin’ it. Just kidding. No, I’m not. Just kidding.

We have all kinds of cookware; a waffle iron, a George Forman grill, and a bunch of old pots and pans, just in case I ever decide to make a huge meal.  7 years in, I think it’s finally time to say goodbye to that pipe dream. Even if I did make a huge meal these people all know me and my food well enough to know they would not want to eat it.

Be there and be whelmed.