The Avoiding of Landfills

Before I set (back) out on the road full-time—this time in a new van I called Vivian; this time closing in on 50; this time after a long terrible, beautiful stint of pain and an autoimmune diagnosis and the good fortune of knowing how deeply my people love me and of beginning to know that allowing them to is a way of loving myself—I had something to deal with. Or rather, I had some things to deal with.

I’ll get right to it. This is a story about consumerism and its opposite, but begins with time travel and includes a big bad wolf.

What were you thinking? the things tittered, teetering atop a tower of plastic boxes in the corner of the master bedroom my cousin had abandoned so I could have a soft landing space.

Here you are again, they whisper-laughed, gawping from the cargo window of the car I used to get to and from medical appointments.

Hey, they hissed from piles growing larger than the holds meant for them in the new van, you need me.

I didn’t.

But I had acquired them.

Let’s travel back in time seven years. See me there in a wee grandmother cottage nestled in a Southern California garden—a young 42, yearning and empty-nesting, uncertain I, as a biological mother who’d only hosted her adult-ish daughter for a couple of years, was entitled to that particular grief. See the heartleaf philodendron draped along the top of the wall over the kitchen sink and the lace-curtained window, stretching around the room and trailing to the floor to lie in a heap near the door. See the pink Victorian wingback my daughter and I thrifted when she first moved in with me—her carob-colored eyes wide with delight each time I said yes to a new piece of furniture. Did I tell her then I’m in awe of her style? She is texture and color, elegance and kitsch, class and play and wit for days.

The chair was among the few items I kept when I moved to this home for one, leaving behind the large two-bedroom, two-bath she and I had shared before she’d left for college. And even this I would have to let go.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

At this point, let me introduce (if you haven’t yet had the pleasure) Ruby the van. Ruby was a sturdy thing, old and not much by way of creature comforts, but reliable. She was freedom on four wheels. She was self-reliance in a metal rectangle. She was self-discovery with eight cylinders and a 35-gallon gas tank.

To commune with Ruby, though, I first had to part ways with everything that wouldn’t fit inside her belly. Let’s just say it was a whimsical, clumsy, clown car parting. Let’s just say I’d already just had to pair way down after my daughter’s departure. Let’s just say, still, my landlord gasped exaggeratedly more than once and declared the cottage Mary Poppins’ bag as I created piles in the garden and moved things from one to the other and back again: Take. Give away. Sell. Toss. Recycle. ??? Let’s just say I had an unrelenting fondness for my plants and their pots. Let’s just say the chair the color of a sunset kiss returned to the thrift store from whence it came—though only before it nearly found itself, absent its legs, installed in the back of a van the color of blood.

Another woman of the road—another woman who’s found herself trekking a desert that could swallow legions whole, under skies like spun sugar, watching miles spool out like ribbons in her rearview—wrote recently that, back in those early days, laughter must have come more quickly, the draw more slowly. You know what she meant by early days, yes? The days when the unfolding of a global pandemic seemed the worst we’d experience anytime soon.

Was this why, when it came time to go again; to see again if a life on the road could pull me from financial morass and the threat of existential malaise; to fill, this time, the cupboards and crannies of a van the color of pearls with the essentials, the things I’d come to possess felt like a mountain sitting on my chest?

By this, I mean the cordilleras sitting on all our chests.

Let’s time travel once more. I know. I know. We just got back to the now, to the Vivian of it all, to the need to dismantle the things that had gone from tantalizing flashes among images of doom to packages on a doorstep to a range with my belly for its foothills. This time we’re only going back three years.

See that house among pines. Let’s get closer. There’s the woodpile and axes out front. Ruby’s waiting patiently in the drive. Aren’t the pops of color in the trees and the gardens and the pond in the back forty inviting? I’m inside, either stoking the wood-burning stove or sitting at the workspace like a treehouse with its second-floor bay windows, laptop open.

A month at this house-sit / writing retreat has passed when the pain comes, dogged and doe-eyed. See me, it demands. See me, it pleads. It hounds me, nipping at my ability to stride. See me, it thunders.

We’re only here, you and I, because this is when I started acquiring things (in this latest iteration). As Ruby grew moss and I grew stilty and shuffling and stunned, I acquired. When I procured a four-door to leapfrog along with Ruby as a more comfortable way to get between places to lay my head—well, you’ve met that car—I’m roomy, its large trunk enticed. And do we have to think about the things I’d left in my sister’s spare bedroom during a visit sometime around year two that didn’t fit in Ruby but with which I could not part?

I can’t stop thinking about a conversation with a dear friend recently. We’re future traveling now, by the way—jumping forward from the slow removal of the mountain pinning me down—Vivian and me at last on the road. It’s our first month. I’m splayed across Viv’s little tiffany and cream couch, basking in the yolky warmth of the day’s last rays on my face, in the parking lot of the bar where I’ll spend the night. The friend on the phone’s a writer too, and our conversations can really wax. So I’m paint the picture of this establishment. It’s a regulars bar, I say. A dive but not in an ironic hipster sense. A ’Merica bar. The pony-tailed bartender with maybe yesterday’s heavy eyeliner, who’s friendly with an edge I don’t begrudge her, serves a guy with a “Come and Take It” T-shirt, another whose bulk hangs over the stool in the same way his cheeks and forehead press toward his eyes, and another who just nods her way every time he sets an empty on the bar. I don’t mention it since my friend wasn’t there, but it puts me in mind of the pub I tended in West Virginia when I was a whole other character—with a husband and a private grief and, now that I think about it, a healthy lack of attachment to things.

Anywho, I make a crack about what must be the regulars’ reactions to the rainbow and trans flags and black life matters sticker in Viv’s window.

“You wouldn’t be there if you weren’t white,” she says after a pause.

“True,” I agree.

“I mean out there,” she says, “doing what you’re doing.”

In this telling, I feel compelled to note that it’s, of course, not technically true that no non-white women are living solo nomadic lives in the US of A. But I get her point. I get the privilege of my relative safety or feeling of safety (and am glad to be reminded to check it).

I also get the privilege of being plagued by things.

And yet, as I prepared to embark on what, in many ways, felt like a starting over, this time in a van called Vivian, I felt the weight of things like an albatross atop the mount, though I wasn’t quite sure for what I was paying penance. With the dead bird and its mountain dealt with and gone, during this conversation outside a don’t-tread-on me watering hole, I felt both free and still plagued by something I couldn’t quite name.

Here are two things to consider when it comes to American consumerism. It can feel like gluttony. But is it possible that gluttony is the sheep’s clothing to the wolf of a system that doesn’t believe it can exist, maybe can’t, without its relentless yawp of, “Buy, buy, buy. Sell, sell, sell”? An economic system whose salvation lay, first, in war and then in people spending all the dough they’d saved during wartime restrictions?

And doesn’t the wolf feed on dissatisfaction? Don’t get me wrong; it’ll make a tasty meal of fear too. But isn’t its best trick hiding the “who” behind the glittery things that can arrive on our doorsteps to make us feel less alone, less less than, less anxious, less unprepared, less existential dread? I mean the who making and getting the cheap, fast stuff to us and what doing so costs them. And I mean who can afford those products. And by that I mean who can’t afford what lasts.

As I readied myself to depart, I felt I’d go mad if I couldn’t whittle the things down to whatever would fit in Vivian’s oddly shaped holds and cupboards. Was it that I wanted to start “clean”? Was it symbolic—did I feel this autoimmune illness that had attempted / was still attempting to have its way with my spine was intricately connected to the metaphorical things that had been, for a very long time, weighing me down? Was it guilt? Whatever it was, the need to purge myself of things felt compulsory.

And even more so, the necessity of finding them a home that was not the landfill. In the process of attempting to fulfill this obligation, I became acutely aware of how absolutely, unyieldingly everything is moving toward wasteland. My former father-in-law would often point out that cows take the path of least resistance. “Follow the cows,” I took him to mean. But maybe he (also) meant, “Cows know one way, but it’s not the only way.”

Landfills are the path of least resistance.

Let me share with you a small sample of things that kept hissing, Just put me in the landfill already. You’ve tried. And then when I growled hush, whispered sweetly, Your stuff is such a tiny portion of the problem. Think of the corporations:

• A stack, nearly as tall as me, of styrofoam coolers filled with re-freezable ice packs (a result of a monthly meds delivery with no option for pickup instead)

• The cushions and pillows from Viv’s old couch frame (which I resized with a handsaw and hammer)

• Three jugs of used radiator fluid

• Some new and some barely used shelving with hardware

• Stacks of lit mags with pearls for words

I can’t stop thinking about everything that, along with consumerism, is simply built into the system.

Here are a few places my great no-landfills (yet) clearing took me:

• Three thrift stores (multiple times)

• One Habitat for Humanity (and, after a great deal of hunting, another similar outfit because the former had no space)

• Two houseless shelters

• Two recycling centers

• A tucked-away pharmacy

• A local bookstore

• A great many, “No”s

• An auto repair shop that took pity on me

• More Facebook Marketplace interactions than I counted

You must know the point of this recounting is not kudos for me or even for this tiny avoiding of landfills.

Let’s zoom in. See me pulling into the shelter lot. I get out, sigh hard, slam the door harder than intended. See the woman on the way out of the shelter, arms full, say hello on her way to the torn yellow tent across the street. Watch the guy behind the counter perk up when I offer the ice packs and some canned goods. We chat as he comes around the desk. A guy with a backward ball cap and a bandana around his throat playing checkers at a small table jumps up and grabs the door before following us to my car. At the trunk, all three of us grin at some shared joke and fill our arms before returning inside.

It was like that again and again:

• At the only pharmacy in town that will take sharps boxes (a not easy discovery), I shimmy with impatience in line—until the conversation at the counter trickles to my ears. One woman shapes her unhurried answers and followup questions into a container to hold just a bit of the shocked grief of another woman, whose husband no longer always knows who she is.

• The grim man, built like a utility pole, at the second shelter is transformed by belly laughter over my earnest dismay that they only want the ice packs, not the remaining few styrofoam coolers. “Let’s toss them together,” he says, eyes gleaming. Outside by the dumpsters, we learn we have roots in the same part of the country.

• I linger at the bookstore, swapping favorite reads with the owner, who worked at the store in high school and never left and who eagerly orders the book I recommend, Unfixed by Kimberly Warner.

• The guy with the missing front tooth and disheveled beard and jacket washed so many times its original color is long gone stoops and coos softly to my cousin’s dog to calm her while I retrieve the solar controller he drove 45 miles to get. “Thank you,” he effuses. “I really need this.”

• “Did it work?” the woman with the gravelly voice wants to know. She’s referring to the grounding sheet I bought out of desperation. “I honestly have no idea,” I tell her. “I was desperate.” “Me too,” she says softly. “Take it,” I say. “I hope you get feeling better.” She smiles. “You too.”

What I’m trying to say is I think our current wolf’s most sustaining meal is loneliness and isolation. And its hunger pains are satiated by our own. Which isn’t saying anything new. Just a reminder to myself where else I might turn when my belly growls for things.

I figured since I gave you so few words last week, I’d give you a piece that’s a little longer than my norm here today. And I have a request: A literary agent is looking through my Substack this week. (Um. Holy smokes. Gulp. And yay!!!!) Let’s show her how engaged we are over here at the Rolling Desk, pretty please, and give this post some love if it finds a place in your heart or head. Thank you!!