Stuffed

It's as American as apple pie: The storage unit.

I see storage companies everywhere I go in the US.  Don't get me wrong, they have their purpose, but for the most part, these are absolute money pits.  How do I know?

I have one.  #375 is my storage unit.

I left a house in Pennsylvania in 2012, where I had a lot of spare space, and moved into a place with almost none.  Even after we got rid of a lot of stuff for the move, we still had too much stuff.

What we kept went into storage.  Storage units, like most everything in Silicon Valley, aren't cheap.

Though it is a money pit, but there is indeed some stuff in there that I want to keep.  Still, when calculating the amount of money dumped into a storage unit versus the potential value of its contents, it is a ridiculously bad investment.

And yet, these storage compounds are everywhere in Silicon Valley, and they are in small towns too.

Need to store your overflow stuff in the small desert town of Fernley, Nevada, population 20,000?  They've got you covered:

There is an emotional component to the one I have, and I suspect that is in play for others who rent these things as well.  In mine is some of my late wife DeDe's stuff.  There's also stuff from my kids' childhood.

But, in the end, it's just stuff.

So I have been working at clearing out this storage unit for the past couple of months.

It is a demanding process, and it can be emotional.  I found a little journal DeDe kept at a difficult time in her life.  I found an incredible poem she wrote that I'm still processing.  I found some surprising art projects she was developing.

But what I have found worth keeping is a fraction of what I have found worth getting rid of.  I've been giving a lot of what has come out away.  There is a cleansing feeling that comes from this.

There are a handful of things with some monetary value, but I don't have use for, which I will sell.  What will remain are a few things that are important enough to take up real estate in the house.

This is indeed a demanding process, but a worthwhile one.  The acquisition of stuff is probably a part of the human condition, but we in the United States have raised it to an art form, and the signs of that dot major thoroughfares today.

But I'm getting out of the storage unit business.  The center of the picture at left is the light at the end of the tunnel.  This storage locker was full to capacity.  Come November 1, it will empty, should you want to move your excessive stuff in there.

But I advise against it.