Saturday In the Garage With Val

Perhaps I've mentioned that I've spent the summer going through Mom's house, sorting, stacking, storing, trashing six decades of stuff. Now we come to the pieces of furniture I want to keep. Which does not mean that I want them inside my house right this minute on the Saturday morning after my first week of school. The closing isn't even rescheduled yet. Let me catch my breath!

Hick, however, believes the great export/import needs to be TODAY. Because he's HICK, by cracky! And he decides when last-minute things need to be done. In fact, he made me make arrangements, ON THE NIGHT BEFORE MY FIRST DAY OF SCHOOL, with my sister the ex-mayor's wife so he could go out there and load things without being arrested for grand larceny.

Let the record show that Hick saw no urgency when T-Hoe broke down last summer, detaching himself from his back-up beeper, his tire-inflation readings, and picking up a grinding noise in his brakes. Nope. Even though I depend on that back-up beeper when The Pony is not with me to issue a warning. Dadgummit! Hick made us buy the car with the bells and whistles, and now it won't chime and it won't whistle.

Apparently, furniture from an estate waiting to sell must be moved forthwith at the drop of a hat, but automobile breakdowns can wait 13 months and counting.

Hick is walking that tightrope between Garage Gold, Storage Wars, and Hoarders. What we need here is an Intervention.

Let the record show that we have a house. A full basement. A BARn with a loft and a closed-in lean-to on each side. A Little Barbershop of Horrors. A Sword Shack. A creekside cabin. An A-frame cabin. A tool shed. And two freight containers. But the furniture Hick had to haul home is here:

Uh huh. That's right. Hick has filled his side of the garage with my furniture. Which we could have gotten next weekend, after I'd had time to prepare for it. Something about going back to school the first week makes one not want to deal with anything but the routine chores of laundry, shopping, cooking, and cleaning that first weekend. Especially when Sunday is devoted to boxing up glassware with one's sister the ex-mayor's wife.

In case you don't get the full effect, here's more from a different angle.

Let's see. We have my grandma's kitchen table and six chairs, my mom's cedar chest, an old recliner that was supposed to have been picked up by Hick's oldest son back when Mom got her new recliner in January (like father, like oldest son), a rocking chair, a desk chair, a curio cabinet Hick wanted to display his treasures, and regular junk we never use that has been in the garage for years, except that it did not prevent a car from parking in there.

I gave Hick a piece of my mind, because I have so much to spare, and he is in such need...and let him know that I do NOT think much of this plan, because the cats will jump up on my grandma's table and claw it to bits while trying to gain purchase with their needle-like talons. I don't much care if they hair up the recliner. That's not mine.

Meanwhile, Mom's house is still sitting there, nobody in it, with plenty of room for this furniture to have been resting.

Don't get me started on the piano.