Moving across country is a daunting task for anyone, and it's no different for me. Although I try to tell myself that I'm a very organized person, in actuality my definition of organization is rather lax. So it should not be surprising to reveal that my apartment is in shambles. But the mess is slowly morphing into piles of boxes, and this past weekend's yard sale helped to get rid of much of the clutter.

I am always surprised at the people one meets when hosting a yard sale. The lookey-loos are my favorites. We began calling the cars who rolled slowly down the alley past our driveway "drive-bys," but instead of firing bullets, they used their eyeballs to investigate every nook and cranny of the sale without ever leaving their cars. I'm not sure if the ones who drove by without stopping were more damaging to my self esteem than the ones who actually got out, looked around, and left without buying anything, but both combined to make me wonder what type of person I was to hold onto so much junk for such a long time. It is certainly a strange experience, to have people pawing through items that you used to cherish, and then to have these people decide that 25 cents is too much to pay for something you've loved intensely, or at least used to love.

It was both a melancholy and cathartic experience. I felt sad to be letting go of things that were important to some aspect of my life, but now I consider it akin to a rite of passage. Out with the old to prepare for the new. It was almost cleansing to the spirit, a great purge of things that were weighing me down (I don't know if I'd go so far as to call it a cosmic colonic, but I think that term is almost apt) so that I am now free to begin the next chapter of existence. While the experience was bitter sweet, it was also totally physcially and mentally exhausting. Thank Jeebus that I had friends and family to help!

Perhaps my worst little helper was my 5 yr old niece. She caught on quick that the sale was a profit game, and she took it upon herself to establish her own "bank." We had a container we were using to collect all the money and make change, and we were carefully keeping a tally of who's items were sold (my family brought their extra stuff to sell as well, and the profits were to be divided at the end of each day). My niece decided that this method wasn't working for her, and in order to maximize her personal profits, she would have to subvert the system. So, in true captalistic spirit, she decided that her own purse would become "the new bank" and she began walking around the sale, her purse held open, telling people that they should put money into her purse and take whatever they wanted, or don't take anything, it's all the same to her, as long as the money ended up in her purse. While she couldn't quite grasp that the sale of items were what generated the profits, she did realize that if she wanted to get paid, she had better work! I guess there's a lesson in that for all of us.