The Old Lady Mafia cleans a garage, and I throw myself away

Just call me "The Godmother".

I made my hubby an offer he couldn't refuse... (mainly because I made the offer psychically, and he's apparently out of the range of my brain waves).

The offer was to clean the garage.

People, this was no small offer, psychic or otherwise. It has been almost a year since I last parked my car in the garage. Until this morning, it would have been impossible to park a teaspoon in the garage. It contained 10 years of accumulated crap, 300 pounds of empty cardboard boxes from Christmas and beyond, an unusable, irreparable queen size bed, a kaput washing machine, and enough Christmas decorations to do Rockefeller Center twice. An ironing board last used by Wilma Flintstone. Boxes of VHS tapes. Countless plastic plant pots. Paint cans. Gas cans. Multiples of dead batteries, dead TVs, dead computers, dead radios, dead stereos, dead lamps. It was the Garage of the Non-Living Dead. There were also gardening and power tools scattered everywhere. There were books and papers to such a degree that we would have been completely insulated against a nuclear attack.

No more. We are now as vulnerable as everyone else on the planet. At 9 AM, the OLM convened (along with two of the Junior OLMs, Becca and Melinda) to discuss the plan of attack over breakfast. We moved the kitty litter box into the house, blocked the cat door to the garage so that the Great Escape kitty could not escape, opened the garage door and began.

We started by pulling just about everything OUT of the garage and sorting it. HGTV and DiYwould have been proud of us. Slash, trash, and stash, that was our motto. Okay, so it's just a variation on "Mission Organization's" KEEP, DONATE and DISCARD, but our motto is more colorful and more in keeping with the Old Lady Mafia persona.

What amazed me during the whole process was the astonishing amount of traffic our activities seemed to stimulate. I live at the end of my street and usually the only vehicles I see are those of my neighbors and their kids. As we pulled stuff out of the garage onto the driveway and lawn, traffic increased exponentially. We noticed that several trucks driven by old farts kept circling the block, thinking, perhaps, that we were preparing for a yard sale. (I would LIKE to sell the yard, but that's another story). Where did these people come from? What is there about the mere suggestion of a yard sale that attracts these people? What do they do, troll the city, watching for unadvertised yard sales so they can have first pick of the crap? After awhile, we began to feel like vultures were circling us.

About mid-morning, I called the city to schedule a special pick-up for all the stuff we wanted carted out. I live in a GREAT city. At various times TODAY, three different trucks showed up at my house, one for the recycling (mostly cardboard), one for the trash (you don't want to know), and one for the dead washing machine. That truck got here just minutes too late; we went in for lunch, and while we were eating, we saw one of the vultures stop and throw it into his truck. Well, it was on the street so it was fair game, but I felt bad for the city guys who showed up to get it. They stayed to go through the stuff that was out on the lawn to see if there was anything they wanted that I was willing to part with. Nice fellas, all of them.

The garage got as organized as the OLM could make it and got thoroughly swept before we started moving stuff back in. We were putting the finishing touches on the driveway clean-up when, in a moment of mental abstraction, for which I can never forgive myself, I threw myself away. The plain facts of the case are these: as I was attempting, in my fatigue, to move an open trash can- one of the huge city cans that the automatic trash collection trucks grab, lift and empty- I leaned on it too heavily, tipped it over, and tipped myself into it. Seconds later, I hit the ground, half-in and half-out of the trash can. Slightly stunned, I did the only thing a person can do when she has just done something both painful and humiliating. I just stayed there.

Fortunately, my friends recycled me before the vultures could get me AND had the good grace not to laugh at me. Well, not to my face, anyway. We must have been a sight for the neighbors, though, because it took two people and a crane to get my plump self off the driveway.

My car is off the driveway, too. It is in the garage. Damn, we're good!