the clearing out continues apace

“Where’s the kettle?” - it’s Dave, sticking his round the bedroom door one morning to enquire.

I’d already gotten rid of our beloved $20 coffee machine too soon. Dave had been shocked. We were living in a state of shock. And decaffeination. I bought a jar of instant coffee to replace it and we’d gotten used to one spoon of Nescafé with boiled water from the kettle. Now, as I rubbed my eyes awake I had to tell him: “The kettle? The 79 year old Russian lady came back. I gave it to her along with our toaster. She’s taken them to her third home in the Catskills”.

“ARRRRGGGHHHH!!! FUUUUUCCCCKKKKK” - (Dave again).

We’re down to boiling water for our morning coffees in a saucepan. Or mostly, going out for coffee. We’re spending a fortune on outside coffee where we never spent anything before. Oh well, the mortgage application is in - we can go wild. Avocado toasts all round. I’ve reactivated my Paddy Power account and everything.

Is this the longest mortgage application in history? Yes. I didn’t realise I had so many accounts! I thought I had one account but the bank were all “Can we see that Venmo account please?”

The clearing out continues apace. Dave is adamant we’re not bringing home furniture because it is too expensive to ship and I said “Not even the green chairs?”. When Dave’s mother asked if we were bringing any furniture home and I said no, she said “Not even the green chairs?”. Seán was visiting and asked were we getting rid of everything and we said yeah and he said “Even the green chairs? Ah I love the green chairs” so we said he could have them and he’s agreed to take one so I guess that makes the green chair a family heirloom now.

When we first visited American cousins as kids, we laughed at how into Ireland they were, right down to every soft furnishing and accessory in their house being green. Then one day, I looked round my New York apartment, that I’d decorated with green chairs, green cushions, a map of Ireland and a St. Bridget’s Cross and I thought..holy absolute shit…I’ve done it. I’ve turned into a laughable Irish emigrant.

Two guys called by to collect our sofa. One introduced himself as “98% Irish” and an interesting side effect of four years living here is that I don’t roll my eyes at this at all and actually find it fascinating that he could be 98% Irish. “Where are your people from?” I asked, leaning into it, and he said “Killarney” - somehow managing to put the emphasis in all the wrong places. I brought him over to the map and pointed it out to him. “This is Dublin” he said confidently (pointing to Waterford) and I said “No, this is Dublin here” (pointing to Dublin). The guys spotted a stray game of Connect 4 and told me how the guy who invented Connect 4 lives in our building. I texted Bill across the hall who usually knows this sort of trivia about our building but he had never heard it before and asked me to confirm it with the doormen. (Glad to see he confirms his sources).

Another neighbour showed up at our door to relieve us of our IKEA shelf. “I thought you might be Irish”, I said to her because when she emailed me, her first name was Irish. “My Grandfather was Irish but I’m Mexican” she told me and for some reason I never asked her for details but after she left, spent the whole day thinking: so your Granda emigrated to Mexico?? I wondered it so much that I eventually emailed her that exact thought: “So your Granda emigrated to Mexico?” and she responded “Yes, the whole family is there” and it didn’t satisfy me at all but I had to let it go.

An Australian showed up to collect another shelf. There was an awkward moment when he video called his wife to let her see it and she didn’t seem to be really dying about it and I walked away to give them space to appraise my furniture in my own home but they took it in the end, thank God, and when I said to him there’s a lot of Australians in the building, he was keen and emailed me later to ask could I please send him the details of the other Australians I know in the building. That’s more like it!

A couple called by to deconstruct our kitchen table and move it to their upstate holiday home. I really am just here furnishing the second, third and fourth homes of the residents of the Upper West Side. One thing I noticed observing the wealthy of the Upper West Side (which is something I’d already learned around the wealthy of Dublin): they are tight bastards. One kid threw herself on top of the table and asked them not to take it but other than that, they are surprising me with their lack of sentimentality on the very visible clearing out of our apartment. The most tears shed so far were by Dave over the coffee machine.

I donated their IKEA wooden train set with their permission but not before I set it all up, one last time…because it really was the most satisfying toy to set up.

I asked if they wanted to bring their pink toy kitchen back to Ireland and they both very indifferently said “Nah..it’s for babies”. Excuse me? Are these the same children that scream blue murder if they find a scrap of broken toy in the bin?? I deserve an Oscar for the shock and ignorance I’ve feigned over toys and artwork they’ve discovered under scraps of food in the bin. And now they’re willingly handing over a perfectly good toy kitchen? Allow me a moment to remember how Santa brought the pink kitchen our first Christmas here and how he had the sense to order a Taskrabbit to assemble it while they were at school, then took a photo of it, developed it and had the photo ready with the rest of their presents on Christmas Day in Ireland, along with a letter saying he’d left this pink kitchen for them in New York? The logistics that man has to think of!!!!

Well, I cleaned it up for maybe the second time in my life and sent it off with the IKEA toy storage boxes to the very grateful 3 year old girl in the building who gets all of the girls’ hand-me-downs. She came down with her parents to collect it wearing plastic Disney shoes we’d given her before and she was so cute playing with the kitchen while both of her parents tried to carry it away. They gave us a bottle of champagne which was unnecessary but welcome and I forgot to say that the 79 year old Russian lady gave us a 500 piece New Yorker puzzle in return for her massive haul. (Looks like someone was doing their own clear out).

“That’s the first time I met that lady. They’re very nice, aren’t they?”.

Dave was shocked I hadn’t met her before.

“That’s the woman you give the girls clothes to? But you always talk about her”.

“I know”, I told him. “We text but we’ve never met. I drop the clothes in a bag on her door handle and she sends me photos afterwards of her daughter wearing them”.

It is weird. What’s weirder is I once spotted her daughter (who I recognised from the photos she sends ) in the window of a daycare as I passed by on the street and I texted her to ask if her daughter was in this daycare because I had just passed her and she looked very happy and she said yes and then I passed on my intel on the 3K application process which she requested and no, we still never met until the passing on of the kitchen. In the remaining week, I bump into this family so much around the building and they are so friendly and it seems such a shame to have kept all our exchanges to faceless texting and Facebook messaging until now.

I make an executive decision that we are not taking the stroller back to Ireland. It is time. The “baby” is 5, she’s starting big school and as well as that, it’s banjaxed. I couldn’t in good conscience give it to anyone so I quietly wheel it into the trash room and I am unusually unemotional about it. Possibly because it’s so manky. Of course, I couldn’t help but think: ‘there it is, the end of the baby years’ but I’m at this game long enough to know that any time you get maudlin about your kids growing up, they almost immediately shit the bed in some way, just to remind you that they are still, very much a baby. (And I know you know that when I say “shit the bed”, I don’t necessarily mean metaphorically).

I eventually reached a point with the packing where I thought “Ah I don’t care about the clutter. Let the movers pack it all and I’ll sort it in Dublin no problem” because I’ve already started to believe that I’m going to be a person that happily sorts clutter, exercises daily, eats 5 fruit and veg and drinks 2 litres of water a day, every day, there. I have the view that everyone has before they move or go on holidays or return from a holiday: absolute belief that I will be an entirely different (better) person there.

Bring it on.