life cycle of stuff
by Kay
We live next door to undergrads. A college student can be one person in my office and quite another when drinking beer on his front porch. I guess the lease was up at the end of July because the kids moved out a couple days ago. The landlord cleaned out the 
house. I don’t understand abandoning this much stuff. Wouldn’t a mom notice that her son left home with a bed and dresser and kitchen table and chairs and didn’t come home with any of it?
Folks have taken a lot of it by now. The kitchen table went first, followed by the dresser. Guess the mattress and sofa are headed for the landfill.
In the great circle of life, undergraduates are headed back to campus in a couple weeks, in vans and U-Haul’s filled with more stuff.
I see that here, being a city with both a university and a college… I just can’t understand how everything is so disposable… was not like that when I went to school.
During move-in last year, I watched a dad haul a xylophone into a dorm. I’m thinking that may lead to a strained roommate relationship, don’t you think?
I can’t imagine actually having furniture as a college student. What happened to the cinder block and board entertainment centers and construction wire wheel coffee tables? Times have changed. In my day, we would have been the curbside shoppers of these kids. Good post!
Oh wow! Did you also have the door set on top of two filing cabinets to use for a desk? I think maybe we were roommates~
We have long been beneficiaries of curbside shopping. I once found a functional Pentax 35mm camera in a case that I ended up selling for $75. In our current (college) town, local churches and civic groups have sponsored putting out big trailers for the college kids to dump their stuff. The stuff gets sorted and sold either by thrift shops or at church rummage sales. Our church rents out the college’s indoor arena for their rummage sale!
We have two universities in our town. One’s a large state school and one’s a small liberal arts college. The small college does a laudable job of helping kids move furniture out of apartments and then getting it to the local mission or Salvation Army.
I spent a year as an exchange student in Upstate New York when I was eighteen/nineteen, and I think I furnished my entire apartment with stuff I found lying in the street! I’m surprised that American students are so open to using other people’s discarded furniture because most Americans I know are more germophobic than Europeans, and they also seem to be more interested in having brand new stuff. Despite that, I’ve never seen much furniture lying on the sidewalk back in the “motherland”.
Sadly, I believe the kids may have also left behind a kitty. I’ve seen her (him?) in the neighborhood since they left.
Wow, that’s disgusting that they might have left behind a cat. I just don’t understand some people. I couldn’t persuade you to trap the cat, and look after it, could I?!
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The kitty was gone yesterday. Perhaps she found her way home, or found a new home. I hope she’s safe. We were poised on the edge of taking her in.