I’m going to tell you a story.
This story is about a thing I call trash mountain and one of the most stressful moments that didn’t need to be a stressful moment in my life.
The year is 2016. Newly wed, we’d just moved Julie’s belongings from Arkansas to our new home in Indiana. While there– in Arkansas– I’d contacted my landlord in Oxford. I’d told him that I planned to be out of my rental by the middle of the next month (exactly 33 days from the message I sent).
Now normally, there’d have been a lease and a specific day for me to move out. But we hadn’t drawn up a new lease since my first year of living there (it was year four). In the state of Ohio, for anyone who doesn’t know, after your lease expires your agreement becomes month-to-month, with rent due on the day that the landlord chooses (but the same day, every month, of course). The agreement can be terminated by either side with 30 days notice. I knew that. Apparently my landlord and the leasing company he worked with didn’t. Seems like if your job was to know how rentals work you’d know the basics of the law. Or you’d Google it.
My landlord got weird on me, and he demanded that I be out of the house by what would have been the end of an Oxford lease, at the end of the month. I had intended to move out on the 15th, at the end of a rent cycle, after my given notice.
I could have fought him, I’m sure. The law was very clearly on my side. But I didn’t want to have a whole “thing.” I felt bad that he for some reason thought I’d told him I was staying another year (I’m positive that I didn’t; I recall him asking me what I was going to do when my wife needed to move and telling him, straight up, I hadn’t figured that out yet but would let him know as soon as I had, which I did. I had hoped during that conversation, where I’d mentioned Julie’s two dogs, he’d have told me it was okay for all of us to live there, but he did not). So I tried to move everything in a three bedroom rental out of the house in five days.
This led to a few problems.
The first one is that if you’ve never tried to do this, it’s damn near impossible to pack a three bedroom house AND move everything out in five days. But if the first day of that is you exhausted from having driven from Arkansas to Indiana, it’s worse, still.
The second problem is that I had planned my move around having three weeks. There was a great deal of culling of stuff to be done, and there was an inordinate amount of wedding gift packaging and trash that wouldn’t fit in my trash cans that needed to go. I had scheduled for all of this to happen– just not in four days. I actually had diagrammed out what had to happen when, who had to be called for what. It would have been the most efficient move I’d ever made.
The last problem was that we had five dogs, and two of the dogs were too large to come to my rental, so they had to live at the kennel (and we had to pick them up before the move ended). It was likewise hard to prep the new house when every second of every day had to be spent trying to get everything out of the old house. Let alone cleaning… I wanted to leave the place spotless, but that went out the window. It became a mad dash for survival with the landlord watching from next door.
So as I was juggling all these parts, a few things fell. And one thing that fell was that while I managed to pack 90% of my stuff, I didn’t have the energy or the power to move the stuff from the house into the moving truck. I hired a crew to do that. I’d hired from similar services before and it went well. This time, though, I didn’t get time to vet the service because when you have to make a hire on 4 days notice, you get what you can get. I got a pretty rough crew.
I had 3 of those Bagster bags set up in my parking space outside the house. I asked the truck loader guys if they knew how they worked, and they insisted they had it all figured out. So I told them where the trash was– one whole room– and where the stuff to go into the truck was– the rest of the house, in boxes and crates.
They went to work. There’s only one door to the house, so they were going through my front door while I was standing and watching/talking to them about how to load the truck.
They went way overboard with the bagsters. They built… well, they built a fucking mountain of trash. It was about 15 feet tall. It was just chucked together, too. No sense of going into the bags, no sense of the fill lines, etc. I didn’t see this until it was too late. I also didn’t see that they’d sort of strewn debris all over the front porch and the stairs. They promised me they’d clean that up when I left with the truck. But they didn’t.
Trash Mountain, as I still lovingly call it, ended up costing me an additional $500, as I had to get a waste recovery company to bring a truck and haul it away. I had this taken care of THE NEXT DAY, but that wasn’t fast enough for my landlord to not send me a series of incredibly rude text messages.
I offered him my full deposit and my full pet deposit as an apology for the mountain being built.
I tell this story because anyone who knows me has probably seen that I am, like many of my ancestors, very free-form about how I put things together when I’m working/living. I jokingly call it “mound building,” but that’s not what it is at all. My mind works spatially. This often results in what many people consider clutter.
One moment in particular that was nightmarish for me was during my dissertation research. I was sick, as some of you know, and bed ridden. I had built a sort of ramshackle circle out of books and articles in my room. My room looked like a research bomb had gone off in it. My mom, trying to help me feel better, straightened up all the books and articles so that the room didn’t look so bad. But… I understood that circle. I know it sometimes seems weird to people when I say this, but I knew exactly where everything was. With it organized, I had no clue where various things were. It was a sweet gesture, but it took me days to reorient myself. And that’s just… how I am. My desk right now, where I’m writing this, looks like a bomb went off on it, too. Yet if you ask me for something I can probably get it without even looking over. I understand this clutter.
But right now, thanks to the snow and the recent holiday, we have a lot of clutter in our house. It’s not Phill Designed clutter. It’s just packaging and such that I can’t get thrown out because they won’t do a special garbage pickup or bring me a roll away dumpster when there’s snow. I get that. I’m alright with it.
But the clutter freaks Julie out. And honestly– after Trash Mountain, it freaks me out a little, too. I still do my “clutter by design” thing, but I don’t like just having excess stuff around. I never did, but in my house in Oxford, I had to sort of live as I could (often traveling, always too much to do) so clutter just happened.
I don’t think it’s something I need to apologize for, as such. Like this isn’t a confessional. It was my house, and sweet pappy did I pay high enough rent for that place. I feel like people judged me for the clutter in that place, that people wanted to shame me (or that people just presumed to put shame on me?) but hey, we do what we can. I wasn’t a bad tenant, nothing was dirty, I didn’t have loud guests or make trouble for anyone.
But I’m a little anxious now as I look at the extra stuff that’s sitting around our house. There’s nothing to do with it, and I know that, but I feel like it almost creates a spectre, like some sort of angry entity that’s a part of our family.
Long story short– don’t ever let a trash mountain form. They’re nasty.
Also, don’t be as people pleasing and apologetic as I was. If you’re moving out and you get 30 days, make the landlord give you 30 days. I think that move-out experience actually left an emotional scar on me, and it didn’t need to. I shouldn’t feel bad about something like that.
And maybe that’s the weird takeaway from all of this. Sometimes… I just feel bad. Like shame. Like… inferiority. And there’s not a reason why I should. And I know that, but I can’t feel what I know, you know?
I can only do my best. That’s all anyone can do.