Home is where the hoard is
Dad and I took a full Loyale of junk to Sally Ann's today. We unloaded many memories, including the Hide-A-Bed mattress from my house in college that I brought home in the back of my truck. That was before I had a classy truck bed bunk, so Ri and I had to carefully arrange the coolers, skis, and duffels to level the mattress every night. That was five years ago. Since then it has served as padding on one wall of the hallway to my childhood bedroom.
Sally Ann also accepted my first boombox, bedazzled with a bumper sticker bragging "You say I'm a psycho like it's a bad thing", and a smiley face drawn on one speaker grate with silver sharpie, but then covered back up with black sharpie in a moment of angst. It must have been a dozen or more Christmases ago that I awoke to find the stereo under the tree, just like I had asked Santa for, complete with two compact discs: Smashmouth's Astro Lounge and The Best of the Beach Boys. All those songs are still on my top rated playlist. I also recorded many a late night radio show on tape cassette with that instrument. Most often it was Radio Free Petersburg with DJ BJ. It only recorded from CD or radio to tape, and not visa-versa, driving my to make mixtapes from the CDs I had. The boombox had been sitting on top of a bigger blown speaker in the back room of my parents' house for at least three years.
As exhausting as it is shuffling my old junk around, it grounds me. It's hard to reconcile sentimental value of these items with the meager price tag they will get at Sally's. Half the stuff we hauled there might just go in the dumpster. But I had a lot of memories stirred up today, and that is really most of what home is. It's not exactly the people, places and things that I've come back to, but the power that they hold to help me realize how I've grown.