Snowglobe

(hey it's drew (✿◠‿◠))

Joey Cleanup is an old Brooklyn guy in his 70s, a staple in my rapidly gentrifying neighborhood for decades. He wears thick-rimmed glasses and has a snaggletooth that sticks out when he speaks or habitually smacks his lips in thought. I’ve known him for so long that I no longer remember how I met him, but we were likely first acquainted through his job: people pay him to pull up in a graffiti-smothered box truck and haul away whatever they consider garbage, junk.

Knowing I opened a seasonal vintage store out of my garage this summer, Joey Cleanup called me at the end of August, asking if I could come by and look at some things he wanted to get rid of.

The morning of our meeting, Joey Cleanup unlocked a battered wooden door and led me down 30 steep, wide steps past rusted car fenders and old machinery. We arrived in a wide basement with low ceilings. The room was packed with open metal shelving, like an old evidence locker, but instead of neatly organized protective boxes lining the shelves, there was a random assortment of what typically fills basements nationwide: stuff. Rusted car parts, snowglobes, stacks of moldering loose records, miscellaneous kitchenware, a porno mag from 2007 that promised to be “packed with raw and uncensored acts of sexual depravity.”

Picking through the aisles, I searched for items to resell in my store. He looked at the small pile I had accrued.

That’s all you want?

I paid for my items and carted them home.

The first thing I planned to sort through was a sun-bleached plastic Coleman cooler full of jewelry; maybe I’d find an errant gold piece. Opening the lid, a nostalgic sensation crept over me. I scooped up a tangled mass of necklaces, earrings, and baubles. A green powder disintegrating from the tarnished metal rubbed off on my hand. Spotting a small paper label at the bottom of the cooler, I recognized the handwriting as my mother’s.

Almost ten years ago, upon inheriting a mass of hoarded housewares, trinkets, furniture, and vintage jewelry from my mother after her death, I called Joey Cleanup. He’d taken items I considered irredeemable: mold-damaged or corroded by the salty water that flooded her storage during Hurricane Sandy.

Now the jewelry ran between my fingers. I recognized the noxious greenish tint of saltwater damage, the corroded chalkiness filming over the gold tone and glass jewels. After sitting untouched in Joey’s basement for ten years, I’d purchased my own discarded items back.

Noticing the stillness and quiet of my living room, I felt myself on the precipice of several different reactions. I could be resentful towards myself for overlooking my connection to this stuff while in his basement, angry at my perceived failure to be a discerning buyer. I could feel disturbed facing these items again. But I remembered a million moments since getting rid of all that stuff when I wished I could look through it again, from my perspective now, instead of when my eyes were clouded by grief and an urgent need to divest myself of it.

Nostalgic in a way I hadn’t been when my grief was fresh, I sorted through the jewelry one more time: there was an old Tiffany’s anchor charm I wore in high school, a choker necklace I’d loved in middle school during my goth phase. With patience, I picked out a handful of sterling silver items, separated the few undamaged pieces that would still sell, and put the rest out on the street in a clean fabric tote bag. In the morning, it was gone.