Life After Mother: Enough to Lose a Garbage Bin

When I first looked at my mother’s two-car garage, stuffed so full you could lose a garbage bin in it, I thought, “It’ll take a year to clean this out, and after that, I can just sweep the floor and tidy up now and then.”
Anaheim has a curbside recycling service but I couldn’t find that my mother’s house possessed any city-issued recycling bin. While visiting the city’s senior center, I asked a receptionist if she could provide a phone number to request a recycling bin. Five minutes later she was still punching her keyboard. I finally walked away, only to have her chase after me and thrust a tiny self-stick note at me. (Nobody writes a note on a plain piece of notepaper anymore.) The number written on it soon proved to be one that was never answered.
Shortly thereafter I moved some papers in the kitchen and found the actual number to request a recycling bin, so I did, and the city delivered one. A short time later I moved a wall-sized stack of furniture and boxes in the garage—and there was the missing recycling bin. I let a neighbor take the extra one.

For several months I couldn’t even park my own car in the garage because one half was full of extra furniture and the other half housed my mother’s Prius with a dead battery—for which a replacement cost several thousand dollars. I persuaded the same auto auction house that had handled my father’s cars to sell the Prius, but when I called a few weeks later and asked for the money, I was told the money made from the sale was eaten up by the expenses incurred. Shortly after that I read where a medical marijuana dealer was seeking used Priuses for his delivery fleet. Maybe that’s where my mother’s Prius ended up.
As for the extra furniture, paying a junk company to haul it away was too expensive, and when the pandemic hit, charities stopped sending trucks around. For some pieces, I cleaned them up and moved them back into the house, others were trashy enough to call the city to make a bulk trash collection. One home-entertainment center I literally couldn’t give away, but I was able to repurpose it as a hardware cabinet once I cleared sufficient space.
As much as I’ve emptied out crates and drawers, however, I’ve filled them up again. I emptied seven crates of cassette tapes and sent them to an e-waste recycler, emptied another crate full of sports memorabilia, but those crates have been refilled with electronics, hardware, camping equipment, crafting supplies. Seven crates of Christmas decorations remain. Extra tools, picture frames, tattered old posters, bags of books, boxes of forty-year-old bank receipts, carloads of haz-mat and e-waste and scrap metal, all got recycled in one way or another.

My garage is still half-full of furniture because I closed my storage unit, the one affectionately called “King Tut’s Tomb” and so what’s left of my father’s possessions have filled what space I spent the last three years clearing. I’m going to have to dedicate some space in my backyard for my recycling and garbage bins because there’s still not sufficient space in the garage for them.