Day 100 ❦Wow! Time to celebrate…

Day 100 ❦Wow! Time to celebrate…

The Gift: The remainder of the yard sale items FREE!

Yesterday I shared with you how much I love yard sales…and I do, but there are always items left over no matter how enticing the prices and I have decided that to end my journey of 100 Days of Giving, I am going to give it all away. What an incredible gift – I had no idea when I was making the decision about what to do with the left overs how many people’s lives would be impacted. In fact, I am still hearing from some of the people who stopped by to pull stuff out of the piles of stuff at the bottom of my driveway.

So the morning after the yard sale comes and I am faced with a big mess. What the heck am I going to do with all of this stuff – it seems impossible that there is this much stuff left but I can’t stop to think about it – I have to get rid of it – I have already said good bye to these items, these objects, these friends with whom I have already parted. If this stuff comes back into my house I will have defeated the lightening exercise – I did pretty well in bringing in a lot of cash, but now have to figure this part out. So I decide to drag everything down to the end of the driveway, write a big sign that says free in several languages and hope for the best.

Almost immediately I was inundated with people. I live on a perfect street to have a sale, lots of places to pull over, it is a one-way and it seems as though everyone in town drives by here at least once a day. Those people started calling their friends and I began wondering if I needed to call in a traffic control officer to help and make sure no one got hurt. After the initial shock of the rush of people I focused on getting everything down to the curb, and as I cleared out the garage, I started finding more and more stuff I could live without and just hauled stuff for close to an hour. And the people came. But it was their reactions that I will cherish for forever. The greatest gift, gratitude, humble and sincere.

After I was done with the big clean-up and I had everything that wasn’t tied down by the curb, I started interacting with those who were stopping by, I was curious what it was about this stuff that made it so compelling that they had to have it – and I was dumb-founded by what I learned. Most of the families stopping by had lost everything in the flood several months before, they lived in apartments and had no insurance and were re-building and needed everything – I fed some of those people. A mom stopped by with her 6 children and I was delighted with the giggles and the expressions as the kids each found something that was “perfect” for them. But the most meaningful was a man who came up to my door toward the end of the day and the pile was pretty picked over, but I had continued to replenish it as the day went on so there was a steady stream of new stuff in there.

He was Hispanic and was struggling to put his question to me, I am familiar with that look as I have used it often when in another country where I don’t speak the language. I told him I spoke Spanish and he asked me if indeed everything in the pile was free and as I replied that yes, everything was indeed free, and he began to sob. I grabbed some Kleenex from the kitchen and by the time I got back to him he had pulled himself together and just said thank you.

Of course I was curious so I peeked out the window to watch and saw 5 children and a mom tumble out of the van that was parked by the curb and the incredulity and tentativeness as they began loading everything left into the van. It felt really good and I was additionally pleased that everything had left my possession. A few weeks later a friend of mine from the Hispanic Community appeared at my door and was accompanied by the man. My friend interpreted and said that first the man wanted to make sure I was not insulted that he had brought an interpreter, but he wanted to be able to say what he needed to say without a loss of meaning and then he presented me with some homemade tamales. He then shared with me that their family has just been evicted from their home and that the 7 of them were living in the van I had seen parked at the bottom of the driveway. He said that while they appreciated all of the things that they were able to acquire, that they most appreciated the dignity and care and compassion I had shown them without knowing their circumstances. He was grateful, he was humble and that was my final gift.

❦ Thank the Universe daily, with humility and filled with gratitude.