I'm decluttering, going through boxes, and identifying things for give-away, but because of the pandemic, it's been difficult to find places that are still accepting donations. I would normally drop books off at the library, but the library's closed. I thought I might be able to give books to the Prisoner's Literature Project, but when I called their number, they said that they've received so many books that they're not taking any more donations.
I successfully dropped off some housewares at a thrift store a couple of weeks ago, but when I went back with books and candlesticks and whatnot, there was a sign outside saying that they were only accepting clothes and household linens.
So I was happy to learn that a local Goodwill was still receiving donations. If you arrived after their donation area was filled, you would be turned away, but as long as you got there early enough, I was told by the helpful person on the phone, you should be OK.
I arrived at the store on a weekend morning, a couple of minutes after the donation area had opened. There were two dumpsters out front filled to overflowing with clothes and boxes and God-knows-what-all. Sheets, towels, shirts, pants, and what can only be called junk of all kinds were strewn all around the parking lot. It looked a fright.
Three people were already ahead of me, unloading into the donation area. They had driven to Goodwill in two vans and a pickup truck, filled to the brim with stuffed toys, bags and bags of clothes, and all kinds of plastic crap, much of it baby and child paraphernalia like swings and gates and those wheeled walker things.
The one guy who was receiving and organizing donations looked beleaguered and told me to put my stuff into a big plastic container without bags or boxes. I had brought a set of eight glass candleholders that I never use—shouldn't I keep them in the box so they stay together? I asked him. Okay, he said, put them on the ground in their box next to the plastic container and put any books on the ground too, out of their boxes or bags.
And I was like: Right on the ground?
Because I still think of this as good stuff that requires a little TLC. If it were trash, I would have thrown it out at home.
But this guy was just trying to do his overwhelming job in the heat, with a mask on.
During our brief conversation, the three other donors had filled the plastic container up and beyond the brim with their discards.
I felt really weighted by the whole experience, from the initial visual of all that waste, all that excess spread all over the parking lot to the image of us donors unloading our unwanted items. These were all things we or someone else had spent money on at some point. These were all things that had been manufactured using raw materials and, of course, they had used energy and produced waste in the processing.
In Mr. Rodgers' seventh grade social studies class, we learned how to fill out checks and how to balance a checkbook. I wish we had had conversations about how every purchase we make, with our checkbooks, or cash, or credit cards, follows us until we cut the cord with that item we bought, and how cutting the cord doesn't make the things we don't want any more go away. It just shifts the responsibility for storing and dealing with them to someone else.