Holiday Break, Cowboy Outfits and Diaries

I’m winding down my e-Bay sales until after the holidays, maybe even for the whole winter and that's a good thing because I’m getting burned out and need a break. Since I started in the spring I’ve had great sales and good, trouble-free customers but the cigarette related collectibles I’ve been selling this month are attracting a lot of people in China and I don’t ship overseas. The e-Bay software and my settings there are supposed to filter out people without a U.S. address and stop them from bidding, but it doesn't stop them from sending a lot of messages in broken English wanting me to change my settings so they can bid or to buy the items directly without bidding at all. It’s not like they don’t have other choices if they really want to bid on my stuff. There are several large import/exporters on our coastlines that place bids for overseas e-Bayers. If they win, the exporter pays the seller who ships the item to them and they reship the items to the overseas buyers. The Chinese collectors apparently have deep pockets to be able to pay for this service plus they always outbid the American collectors. I don't mind selling to the import/exporters but the only unpaid auctions I've had all year have come from selling cigarette related collectibles and it's a long, drawn out pain-in-the-butt process before you can relist your items.

My last new listings were on Sunday so I’m in the wind-down phase and should have all twenty of my current e-Bay auctions closed and shipped before the post office turns into a Christmas Crazy-Land and I'm more than ready to shift gears. Next up on my downsizing schedule is deep closet purging my coat closet. I have seventeen coats and jackets in there---including one that is at least 35 years old and, yes, I still wear it. It's my go-to-coat for in between fall and winter. My goal is to end up with two coats for winter, two for summer, two for fall and two for rain.

I also have six Pendleton wool shirts in that closet---all classic cut westerns and I’d planned to sell the shirts on e-Bay. New they go for $149 and used I could get $35-45 each. But I don’t want to deal with people returning stuff for size so I’m trying to talk myself into giving them to Goodwill along with the coats. It's killing me to let go of the Pendleton’s. The $200 to $270 I could sell them for is hard to ignore plus I'm afraid if I donate them I'll see one of them on a homeless person. Don was the type of person who would have given a needy person the shirt off his back, but apparently I'm not. I'm too wrapped up in how he looked in them. His idea of dressing for fun and feeling good was a pair of Levis, a plaid Pendleton shirt, his Stetson cowboy hat and his Tony Lama cowboy boots. In his prime he was a head turner and I think of him every time I hear Dolly Parton singing:  

“Ooh, Why'd you come in here lookin' like that

In your high heeled boots and your painted-on jeans

All decked out like a cowgirl's dream…

Why you're almost givin' me a heart attack

When you waltz right in here lookin' like that.”

I’m not looking forward to the winter, hold up inside the house with lots of purging to do that is sure to take me back in time, a necessary place to go in order to move forward to my next chapter. One of the purging projects I have to do is to dispose of a lifetime of diaries. I’ve tried doing it a couple of times in recent years but I got lost in doing the “last” read-through and decided there was still value in keeping them. This time is different though, since I’ll be going to an independent living, continuum care campus where strangers could end up going through my stuff, if I have to move on to their Memory Care or Hospice building. Not sure how that works. I suppose they give your family x-number of days to clear your stuff out but who knows if my nieces be in a position to do it when the time comes. At one continuum care place I toured before picking this one out, they had an area where they sold the furniture and stuff left behind by residences. It made me sad in a way that going to estates sales never did. At least with estate sales, I always believed the family went through stuff before the public was invited in and could discover that aunt Florence kept a thirty year old flow chart of her periods. Some things aren't meant for strangers to ponder or make fun of. By the way, I don't have an ancient flow chart but I do have a list of every guy I've ever kissed. Just sayin'.

I wish I had a fireplace to burn my diaries in. Somehow that seems like a more fitting ending than sending the books off to recycling or worse yet, to the landfill with the trash. They burn old, worn-out flags with a ceremony that honors the purpose they served. There should be a ceremony when letting go of decades of your recorded daydreams, venting and jumbled thoughts. The diaries helped me learn how to sort out my feelings, how to keep secrets and they taught me how to write stream-of-consciousness style that I often do in this blog. I need a more fitting ending to my set of black books with the red spines than sending them off in a garbage truck or dumping them into the recycling roll-off at the county collection center. I’ve got my thinking cap on, trying to come up with an alternative but it must be lined with tin fold because nothing is coming though. ©

Don's first cowboy outfit. When I was the same age I was sleeping with my Gene Autry cap gun under my pillow.