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| A corner of my study. As you can see, I have kept too many books!! |
In 2006, when I was establishing our publishing business, I decided not to buy ANYTHING if I could get it on Freecycle. And so, we partly moved out of the cash economy for a while. Here is my account of our adventures.
The Kindness of Strangers
The words flashed greenly.
Free Yamaha PSR. An electric keyboard which simulates a harp… “Let’s get it,” I say.
“The kids aren’t musical,” my true love says to me.
“They might be,” I say. “And it’s free.”
Fatal words.
“I love music,” our seven year old adds brightly.
It’s our first day on Freecycle.org, founded in Tuscon in May 2003 by Deron Beal. However, since it’s slightly déclassé, like E-bay, money, underwear, those on it never mention it. Three years later, three million people are. After some dithering, I join them.
The dithering was prescient. Freecycle feels like a barking carnival, a literal free-for-all. Through the day, e-mails: Offered, going, GONE, and raucous WANTEDS. Whoosh. “Freecycle!” the children say, excitedly, resignedly.
We are offered a pair of seventeen foot kayaks. The idea of young girls handling those monstrosities appealed. We’ve now to get life jackets and paddles—but, hey, it was free.
* * *
A poet’s widow offers bookcases on Freecycle. I describe my plight, boxes of Freecycle books, impulsively garnered, poetry, novels, gardening, chess, art, cookbooks, children’s books, clogging the arteries of our home. Books, books, everywhere, and not a minute to read.
She asks archly, “Do you need more books? Geoffrey left fifty thousand.” Does one need heroin?
My heroine. What books!! Rare first editions, many signed, furred with dust, in every nook of a four storey house. “He didn’t know when to stop,” she explains. “When he wanted me to build an arch over our bed for books, it was a health and safety issue. ‘It’s the books or me,’ I said.”
Three times we fill our people carrier with the fruits of his choice, then stop, weariness prevailing where good sense does not. I think superstitiously of the Hope diamond and heartbreak. Besides, our house is beginning to resemble hers.
In Sissinghurst, Vita Sackville-West’s romantic English garden, everyone lived and wrote in a house or outbuilding of their own. (Hers was a tower!) That’s what each of us need, we concurred. A house of our own.
Freecycle gave it to us. A garden shed with huge picture windows; a twelve foot conservatory; a hexagonal greenhouse.
Can an acre and a half become cluttered? If one is not careful! If one becomes The Fool who Built Bigger Barns.
We get Duke on Freecycle, “an Alsatian, handsome, good with kids, great guard dog.” Too good to be true? Unfortunately! Handsome, yes, in a wolfish way; his alert eyes and shaggy mane beguile us while his ears jaggedly clipped by his abusive first owners prick up as we are lectured on his neuroses. Once home, he demonstrates them. The tyrant dog rounds up every ball he finds, glaring at us though his sharp aristocratic eyes, and nipping us with his sharp aristocratic teeth if we approach them or him. Back he goes. The kids cry.
* * *
Autumn is the season of mists and rabbits. We acquire timid, sweet-faced Freecycled baby Twilight, who eats and eats and becomes a massive armful of Giant European hare; chipmunk-faced Chippy, a Netherlandish Dwarf; and Starlight, a dull thrice-rescued rabbit.
Freecycle provides hutches and runs for the rabbits, and the Freecycle ducklings and hens. A hermit, courting frugality, once got a free cat to kill the mice, and then a cow for free milk for the cat , and then a field for free green grass for the cow…
* * *
Having just moved from the US, we found ourselves, in mid-life without anything electrical that worked! From those migrating across the ponds, we, perhaps foolishly, acquire booty: a wide-screen TV/VCR, all-region DVD player, a fridge, freezer, dishwasher, vacuum cleaner–stop-gaps until time and money abound. We accept an unwanted inherited Mitsubishi, so no longer have to maneuver our people carrier “the wrong way” on Oxford’s narrow streets. A handmade Edwardian tallboy in beautiful woods. Massive cherry bookcases. Chinese lamps.
Organizing our loot frazzles us.
Freecycle. The potlatch of the affluent society. A giving to strangers unprecedented in the history of the world? The kids love it, Christmas through the year. A ten foot trampoline, instant rejuvenation. A portable swimming pool. An ice-cream maker. An astronomical telescope. A microscope. The dreamy musings of a summer’s day become reality like the three wishes of fairy tale (with their secret caveat: Be careful what you wish for.)
It’s the biggest, weirdest, funnest catalogue in the world. You didn’t know these things existed; you didn’t know you needed them; and now, you have to have them!!
And, in this case, ultimate lure–
It’s Free.
A free lunch, you drive to, store, care for, and maintain.
* * *
If you wants to be busy, it’s just the thing. Honey Do lists grow. Chandeliers, mirrors, wall-mounted shoe boxes–projects–pile up in the utility room. Inanimate objects, like living things, demand attention: dusting, straightening… If they don’t get it, they too, in code, scream.
My jealously guarded in-box fills. The administrative challenge of pick-ups and deliveries mounts. Distraction! “S.T.U.F.F.–Something That Undermines Family Fun.”
You read your e-mail incredulously. All these people going though their houses, getting rid of all this stuff, and all these people gazing at their computer screens, acquiring this stuff, propelled by the dangerous, contra-spiritual force of greed.
“Things are in the saddle and ride mankind,” Emerson wrote. Still are, still do.
“I was a mathematician,” my husband says wistfully. “I wrote,” I say.
The tenses tense us.
“A good story,” he says, hopefully, “has a beginning, middle, and an end.”
“It used to,” I say.
Ours does. I survive seven weeks on the Freecycle list, seven weeks of details of stuff 15,000 people in Oxford want to (or have) acquired or shed. Too much of good things can also be toxic. Too much water can poison.
Enough! I succumb to quieter lures. A life free from greed. Simple living, high thinking, in the way of ancient sages–or a rough approximation of both.
I now recycle.
Read my new memoir: Rosaries, Reading, Secrets: A Catholic Childhood in India (US) or UK.
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My book of essays: Wandering Between Two Worlds (US) or UK
Lol! You'll suddenly stop, and become a Freecycle giver once you can't find what you need in all the largesse.
Thanks for your comment, and welcome to my blog, Sherrey!
Sorry but I found myself giggling as I read! We've recently been helping a sibling and his wife downsize as health issues require them to move from 3000 sq.ft. to a little less than 800. The corner of your study is what my home is beginning to look like — I can't leave a book behind, or a blank journal, or a CD, or anything they offer! And now I'm beginning to feel greedy . . . we must STOP! Thanks for a delightful piece of reading tonight.