"Moving into the New House"

Moving in to the new house, Jena was determined not to fill it with crap. All summer long she had been dropping off loads to the Goodwill. Rickety chairs, an old computer desk, an Epson printer, t-shirts, shoes that hurt her bunion but that she bought anyway for a summer wedding and now the newlyweds were already heading for divorce. 

She unloaded reams of papers, boxes of them, actually.  College textbooks, spiral binders, 3-ring binders.  Those she dumped in the recycling.  She rationed how much she would bring to the curbside each week.  Because Waste Management actually charged her for dumping too much in the bin the month before and it was mistakes like that that drove her crazy.  Having to pay for everything. In every way.

When she considered what furniture was coming with her to that new house, at she tried to stick to her campaign to buy or bring only those pieces that stored stuff, not stuff itself.  She didn't need any more nick knacks; her sentimentality was weighing her down.  She was running out of places to put things so they ended up spilling on to her kitchen counter, cluttering her bookshelves, falling off her vanity into the sink with an annoying clunk each time she reached for her saline solution.  How many bottles of Body Shop body spray did she need?  So what if it was a gift from her sister three birthdays ago. Her sister wouldn't care, my God, she wouldn't even know that Jena was still dutifully pumping the overly sticky sweet perfume onto her wrists, backs of her knees, between her breasts each morning primarily just to, eventually, finish the bottle so she could throw it away without feeling guilty about not finishing it to the last drop.  Besides, it was too tacky to give a half empty bottle of perfume to the Goodwill.  If only she could just let it go.

Moving in to the new house, she is going to let it go.  She already has.  She let go of her whole marriage, actually.  Her new house was actually a garage apartment adjacent to a double wide right off of Highway 145. It was a ridiculous $600 a month to rent, and the husband she was leaving drove by at least twice a day on his way to work.  She could feel his anger in the roar of their Landcrusiser's engine as it passed her window each morning. She tried to park her car behind the cropping of juniper bushes, because there was no garage, only a burn barrel and the fence was only barbed wire.  She felt so exposed in her new house, but not cluttered. 

If only he had let her clean throw out some stuff.  Who knows.  She actually wrote it down on their first and only marriage counseling session.  She was supposed to write down a list of things that she wanted to change.  Later, years later, after this crisis has passed, she found the list.  It broke her heart when she read some of the things she was asking for.  One of the first things she had written was, let me throw away the old bills and mail that has piled up on our kitchen counter.  You do not need to keep itemized phone bills. She knows that.  Instinctively. And God forbid, not for three years.  But he insisted.  And because she kinda likened him, a bit, to God, or at least someone awfully smart, and powerful, she didn't know how to protest.  And the piles grew.  Until, well,