Goodwill Purging

Hunter returns booty

I have been a Goodwill Hunter all my life. Not the hyper genius janitor kind or kid from the other side of the tracks with Einstein’s brain. I mean a shit collector. A person who goes to the Goodwill and hunts.

But that was the old me. So I’m saying goodbye to all my crap. We’ve had a good run, but I’m dumping my junk. I’m showing up every day at the Goodwill and saying, “Sayonara, crapola. I want to return this. I’ve had it for five years. It cost a buck fifty. I don’t need a refund. Put it back on the floor.”

It’s starting to get embarrassing. The same guy keeps unloading my Suburu. I’ve taken to changing hats and wearing wigs, so he doesn’t recognize and judge me.

He tosses all the objects I carefully washed and pristinely placed in my trunk into the big blue plastic dumpster like it’s trash. I use telekinesis to straighten out the boxes he’s so carelessly discarded.

The third time I showed up with a full trunk, I explained to him that I was leaving the country. “Oh yeah,” he said. “Where you going?” I wasn’t prepared for his follow-up.

“Montenegro,” I answered, having recently read an article about it. “Apparently, you can buy citizenship there pretty easily,” I told him. He lifted his eyebrows and looked at me more closely. Damn. I made myself too interesting, memorable.

The fifth time I went, I wore my pink wig and a white sundress. “Can you believe how much crap my parents left me to deal with?” I said to the young man as he removed file cabinets, bongos, and hardcovers from my trunk. “My parents are such hoarders.”

“I hear that a lot,” he said and walked away. This version of hoarder me was less interesting than the one buying citizenship in Montenegro.

On the eighth drop-off, it occurred to me that I was a middle-aged woman, aka fairly invisible to an eighteen-year-old boy. He couldn’t pick me out of a lineup. At most, if he was an observant fellow, he was thinking. “That lady reminds me of the one moving to Montenegro.”

It’s embarrassing owning so much crap, but I’m shedding myself of it. I feel like a snake who’s been strutting around in every snakeskin I ever shed. It’s too much. It’s over the top. No more layering for me. I’m a snake, for God’s sake. If I’m cold, I should lay on a sunny rock.