By Karen Anderson, Club Humorist
At 8:15 a.m., a massive truck lumbered down our street and dropped a 12-foot storage pod in our driveway.
“Are you moving?” a neighbor asked.
“No,” I said. “We’re remodeling.”
If the word “remodeling” conjures images of quartz counters, marble shower stalls, and burnished hardwood flooring, let me disillusion you. We were having a French drain and a sump pump installed in an unfinished section of our basement that serves as my kitchen pantry, storage area, and laundry room.
After 14 years, quite a bit of stuff from the finished sections of our house had found its way into the depths of this storage area. Since the drainage team needed unimpeded access to the basement floor, all that stuff had to go somewhere.
I considered taking it to the local dump. We settled for lugging it into the rented storage pod, where I could conduct triage.
While the drainage team set to work inside, I set to work in the pod. Keep in mind, this stuff had accumulated in a dark concrete basement with bare-bulb lighting. Now it was in a pod with a translucent plastic roof. With the sun overhead, the place was lit up as if for a high-fashion photo shoot. So I got a good, hard look at our stuff — and freaked out.
What on earth were these things, where had we gotten them, and why?”
Was it possible someone else, with very bad taste, had been shoving garage-sale finds into our basement?
I went back in the house, made a strong cup of tea, and sat at the kitchen table pondering this. I’d probably still be there, moaning and shaking my head, if the drainage crew hadn’t fired up the jackhammer in the basement underneath me. That got me back out to the pod. By the end of the week, the crew at the local donation site considered me a regular.
A yard sale and our local Buy Nothing group took care of dozens of other weird items from the pod, including a stuffed wolf puppet, a basket large enough to be a bed for a small pony, and a box with 500 plastic spoons. By that time, the drainage project was over. We moved what little was left in the pod back into the storage area and I drifted off to sleep that night imagining using the handy little pod to empty and reorganize the garage. Maybe the garden shed. Possibly the Scholarly Gentleman’s library. Hoo-hah!
At 8:15 a.m. the next morning, I heard the scraping of concrete, the screeching of metal, and the growl of a big motor. Were the contractors back?
I peered out the front door as a huge truck rumbled past. The pod rental period was over! I watched as the little pod went off down the street, taking with it my fantasies of complete household organization.
“Oh, good,” said the Scholarly Gentleman. “I’ve got my parking spot back.”
