Originally published in The Nome Nugget, Summer 1995
You just can’t bring everything up here with you on a plane. And a Connex box on a barge sounds like a little too much of a commitment for a small house in Nome for the summer. So, like a most of the soldiers in the seasonal army that descends on Nome every spring. I’ve got all my household goods in storage someplace else. Wooden bedframes, entertainment centers, oak kitchen tables, barbecues, picnic tables and benches, stuffed animal collections, bookshelves–all that stuff has got to go someplace! So we soldiers mooch some space in somebody’s garage or rent a locker or do like we did and stuff everything into six giant plywood vaults and pay rent on them in a giant warehouse 4,000 miles away. We’ll get it back pretty soon. Sure we will!
Last summer I bought a folding table and chairs from a woman who’d stored her stuff up here for eight years. Her family was planning to spend just one year in the Midwest but the time kept going and going like an Energizer rabbit of migration inertia. I wonder how many other buildings in Nome are sitting full of somebody’s household goods? If we were logical about this, I should give away my stored household goods to someone in Texas and someone here could give me their stored goods to use in Nome.
I talked to a man in Council last July who said he’d had stuff in storage for 35 years. I kept trying to back away from him, hoping his storage contagion wouldn’t somehow leap onto my skin and cause me to keep my household goods in storage until the year 2030.
I do feel great about one thing, though. I don’t have anything stored in my mother’s garage. I helped her clear it out last fall, a job that took great emotional discipline and the strong backs of two waste management men each Tuesday for four weeks. We carted out old spidery carpet rolls, mildewed couches, three-legged chairs, cans of rock hard old paint, and melted record albums from my old boyfriends. It would be a crime for me to let any of my stuff sit there now . . . wouldn’t it?
I fantasize about the day we get all of our goods back together. Will it be like Christmas Day? Will we want to get rid of most of it when it does arrive? This might be just the opportunity I’ve been looking for to get rid of my husband’s beloved rusty orange barbecue once and for all. Either that or I know of a newly cleaned-out garage with a lot of storage space.
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