Unit 129

I read a statistic that said 1 in 5 Americans pays for a self storage unit. I am one of them. Or at least I was until this past weekend. I’ve moved a couple of times in the last 14 years and during one of those moves, I rented a small storage unit for some of my stuff. It was only supposed to be short term. I remember thinking at the time that my stuff would be in there for six months or maybe a year until I could sort through it and figure out what I wanted to keep and what I wanted to throw away. Each month, when I wrote the check for the rent on Unit 129, I said to myself that I need to get over there and sort through that stuff. But my storage unit was 60 miles away and it just seemed easier to write the check and put it off for another day.

This past weekend, I finally confronted my procrastination. I rented a truck from U-Haul and to save my back, hired a young friend to help me load. It had been some time since I had been to my storage unit…years actually…and when I opened the door, I was overwhelmed by stacks of deteriorating cardboard boxes, cobwebs, mouse poop and dust covered artifacts. Stuff. Stuff that at one point I purchased with real money. Stuff that had meaning enough for me to keep and store and pay rent on. There were some things that were of real value. I had a large chest of tools. Good tools, tools I could use. There were some old pictures. An old Lionel train set that might be worth something. An orange Home Depot bucket. An extension cord on a retractable reel. Everything else in there had no real value, no use any more. It was trash. All trash.

I walked around the heap of stuff, poking into dusty boxes, picking up this and that. I recognized everything around me and wanted to find some reason why I had saved this stuff, but I couldn’t. I was deeply disappointed in myself for neglecting this chore for so long and felt an intense and painful sadness as I looked over the relics of my life. I negotiated with my helper to load and haul everything to the landfill for me. Three full pickup truck loads. 80% of what I was paying to store went straight into the trash.

I called the rental office at the storage facility yesterday and told them that I had vacated Unit 129. The woman thanked me for my business “all these years.” Just out of curiosity, I asked her how long I had rented there? “Since 2013”, she said.

11 years…my God.