Moving House and Climate Change

Indoor forest. We'll throw out plastic trees when we move.

Change of address is either by choice or circumstances and it involves pruning our belongings, especially things we used once or twice and are gathering dust in the garage or attic. 

Kids, especially teens, find it hard to adjust after bankruptcy or divorce and getting rid of things that used to define them, like skis or dirt bikes. Some parents are transferred to bigger cities like New York where rents are exorbitant and there’s no backyard like the one they had in Alabama. They might be moving to an apartment building. They’ll be lucky if they find a condo unit that has two parking spaces, not one like the rest of the building. Therefore, there’s no garage to store junk.

Moving forces us to audit. There are things we cannot take with us because of the trimmed space so we either sell them or donate them to Salvation Army and Value Village thrift stores. The audit reveals that we didn’t use them that much. We bought them because we could. We had buoyant credit cards and houses with cathedral ceilings. That’s why we bought plastic trees and put them next to the window. They blocked the sun, but that’s another story.

Can I Recycle This?

We seldom think about that. The plastic forest we have in the study might be a great conversation piece when friends drop by, but can we recycle it, if we are forced to move? This is all academic I guess, because who thinks about recycling and climate change when we have four credit cards and banks play father Christmas, by offering us overdrafts?

Nonqaba waka Msimang

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