The stairs are creaky, and it's this ancient looking corridor with doors on the left and right that enter into more rooms that are dark, cold, and smell pretty funky. It reminds me of a prison or something from the middle ages; I expect to see a man holding his arm out from behind bars with a bone attempting to entice the dog with the keys around its neck to come over.
I start working at 6 am because it is so hot in Belgium and my delicate body cannot handle manual labor in extreme temperatures. What is glorious about this job is the fact that I can roll out of bed, put on some clothes, have a cup of coffee and walk downstairs to work. So anyway, I walk all the way downstairs to work in the basement. I'm carrying up boxes, broken toilet seat covers, old computers and awkwardly shaped bags filled with god knows what. But I'm also carrying up boxes and boxes of just...people's stuff. It's all from years ago...10 or 15 years ago, all belongings people left, perhaps intending to come back and collect.
I was simply carrying up the boxes until I worked my way to what I'll call the 'damp area.' Word to the wise, if one tries to pick up a cardboard box when the bottom has been eaten away by moisture and time, it will break. The contents will spill everywhere. If you're lucky like me, a huge dead mouse/rat will fall at your feet and its surviving children will scamper away from you further into the creepy corridor. After jumping up and down yelping a few times, I disposed of the dead mouse and proceeded. The next bag contained a fur coat (which, after the aforementioned experience, appeared to me at first glance as a mutant super rat), and a few beer glasses. The other boxes contained various things...old papers, files, books, a few pictures, a few geodes...keepsakes. I wonder about the people who left these things. I picked up a colored pencil drawing from one of the boxes...its ripped edges tell me it came from a sketchbook. A pretty landscape graces the page, a blue sky strewn with clouds...its very pretty, and I wonder, why'd this person tear it out of the book? And why did he/she keep it? Why didn't he/she come back for it?
Its funny to be going through other people's things. I'll never know who this person is, but I've got a piece of his/her sketchbook hanging on my wall because I think it's pretty. I know that life isn't about material things, you know, that 'the things you own end up owning you.' But nevertheless, I'm fascinated by belongings. I find it interesting, the items people choose to keep, to hold onto. I'm touching things that a while ago, people possessed, wanted to keep. It's like a little connection across time. Every box could tell me a story, if I wanted it to.
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