Dumpster Fire

Saturday started out on a bright note.

I went running through the side streets of Gardiner, which are the happiest streets to run on. My mom and I came across an old home with a beautiful porch and a for sale sign. We role played what it would be like to live in it. Fast forward to Payson’s football game and I mention said house to my realtor husband and all of a sudden we have an appointment to go see it.

I should preface the next part by saying, normally I am a pain in the ass to go look at houses with.

I make fun of the carpet colors and the cat smell. I tell him I can’t picture myself in this house with that certain sofa. I am tell him the vibe is off and the neighbor gave me a dirty look. But on Saturday. It was right. I walked through the whole house and felt all the feels. The rooms were spacious, the kitchen was enormous and gorgeous. It had a reading nook! A READING NOOK! It had two plus bathrooms. I pictured Monday mornings, with all of us in different actual bathrooms and not all sandwiched into the same dinky bathroom at our house. I took a mind photo in the entry way of a huge Christmas tree decorated with ornate quality ornaments and also the shitty ones that my kids have made for me throughout the years, but which are actually my favorite. I was so in love with the house and my husband was so shocked that we were on the same page, that we went home and instantly made an offer. Our first offer as a married couple. I even typed a letter, explaining my instant relationship to the home. I did several drive by’s and hugged the democratic signs and pictured myself decorating the front porch for Halloween.

This love affair began an instant purge at home.

I ordered a dumpster, one of those big roll out ones, used for movers and dead bodies. I started posting crap on the Swap and Sell. Time for moving everyone! Time for the up and up. And then. The call. The house went to someone else. Someone else. My heart cracked a little bit at someone else cooking in that kitchen and shaving their legs in their own bathroom. God damnit 2020, can’t a girl catch a break?

Then today the dumpster showed up and when my husband got home, he heave ho’d an old chair right down the center. We both heard it crash into the abyss. That felt good, he told me. It’s been a week at work, so I liked the sound of that crash and the feeling of the purge of the wicked. I wanted to dump all my extra work into it too. All the anxiety, all the bitching. I wanted to channel it right into that dumpster. The bad vibes, the sadness from the house we didn’t get, old sports bras that don’t support me right, google meeting break out rooms centered in silence, those text messages from Susan Collins, all that crappola, right into that huge ass dumpster. I think it’s a symbol for the year. Yes we didn’t get that house we wanted, but we are still getting rid of the old and the negative and making room for the new. Or the new to us.