We have cleaned the barn out. I’m not even sure why we call it a barn anymore as there are no longer animals living there, but I digress. It’s strange, I don’t hear about people doing their spring and fall cleaning as in days past. I remember doing some extra deep cleaning when the weather warmed up in the spring. And again when the days started getting colder.

People would remove the throw rugs from the house and hung out. Beating rugs was a marvelous way to get rid of any extra aggression (although admittedly my aggression was due to having to clean like this). They washed the walls and windows. If you had wall to wall carpet, it was shampooed. Deep cleaning things that you didn’t really do on the regular.

That is how I’ve been looking at my time cleaning out the barn. I must confess I had the same amount of aggression when I started because… I hate not knowing where to put things, especially Mr. V’s things. He has a ton of hunting and fishing and golf gear. And Mr. V… well he has pack-rat tendencies which conflict with me at times and needs a firm push gentle nudge to really think about if he needs or uses an item.

I know exactly what to do with my stuff. I either love it, use it, donate it, or trash it. If it’s something worth keeping, I find a home for it. If I haven’t used in it a 2 years, I probably don’t need it. Anything we no longer needed in the house was taken to the barn. Ten years of stuff piling up. Two businesses worth of leftover stuff, not to mention that is where the fiber studio/summer kitchen is, along with Mr. V’s Man Cave.

Miss Sally prompted the summer barn clean-out as I called it. Or to be more precise, Miss Sally’s things. Miss Sally passed towards the end of March. I had to get her apartment cleared out before the 1^st of the April or they would have required me to pay another month of rent.

It was impossible to move everything to the house and the barn. How the hell she managed to get so much stuff into a one-bedroom apartment is beyond me. She wasn’t really a pack-rat by any means. She was however the only daughter and oldest sibling of three, one of whom had passed years before. She had no children of her own and wasn’t close with her surviving brother. So everything left to her by her mother was left to me.

It was slightly insane at that time as it was the beginning of Covid 19. We had little time and social distancing was making it difficult to get a storage space, add to the fact that there weren’t any available. I told Mr. V we should operate as though we were bringing everything to the house. No one was accepting donations either, I had attempted to try both Salvation Army and Goodwill. However, I was able to donate Miss Sally’s two walkers and bathroom chair to a local church that has a lending closet.

To Sally’s credit she only had tote or two of family memoirs. The rest of the stuff was useful, like a beautiful set of drawers and highboy. I mailed off two enormous boxes of photo albums and family memories I thought her brother would like to have. In the 11^th hour, Mr. V found two compact storage units next to each other that would help take the load off trying to cart her entire apartment into my house. We were able with the help of another couple to get everything shoved into the storage.

The next order of business was to get a dumpster. I know I live in rural Maine, but getting a dumpster was akin to pulling hen’s teeth (as the saying goes). I called every place that Google could find near me. “I’m sorry we don’t service your area” was the response. In desperation, Mr. V drove around until he found a dumpster in someone’s yard and took down the number. Finally, in July, we were able to get a dumpster. We had only been trying to get one since May.

I hope to move everything of Miss Sally’s into the barns and then go through it to decide what stays and what goes. It looks like there is a large yard sale in my future.