The Thrifted Drive
I drive toward Marine Drive and pull up to the Goodwill Outlet, which many secondhand shoppers call “the Bins.” As I park, I notice the diversity of people bustling with their shopping carts to their cars. A mom shoves bags of clothes into her minivan while her children dance around the vehicle holding well-loved plastic action figures. A millennial holds a stack of dusty records while towing a mid-century shelf in a blue Goodwill shopping cart. I eye it and think, Good find. Some of the cars in the parking lot double as homes, filled to the brim with someone’s life, but there are also Teslas and BMWs.
I have been a vintage reseller for more than fifteen years. What started as a side hustle that helped me afford the rising tuition of a private college is now an insatiable hobby that helps fund a scholarship I started in 2020. I almost exclusively shop secondhand for my personal use as well.
I open the glove compartment and grab plastic gloves, a mask—the uniform of the Bins—and a bundle of reusable bags to carry my anticipated haul. Walking through the doors, I am accosted by how much we discard as consumers: Heaps upon heaps of clothes, tangled electronic cords, storage totes of assorted glassware, and stacks of worn furniture fill the warehouse. Items are priced by the pound, and the price drops if you purchase more than twenty-five pounds. Outside of the main floor, sliding doors provide a glimpse behind the scenes of the store, where large five-by-five-foot packing boxes filled with donations sit on pallets, organized into clothing, books, electronics, and more. Piles of unsorted furniture line the walls, and staff push carts in queues ready to roll out for shoppers. It is a constant rotation of excess.
The community of thrifters is another thing that sets the Bins apart from other shopping experiences. When I dig through the bins, I am often nudged by fellow shoppers who ask what I’m looking for, share a shirt that looks like it’s my size, or hand me a match to the shoe I’ve been holding.
As I rifle through old books and trinket treasures, I feel a small spark of joy as I think, What will I find next? Something drives us to seek and find; a modern, nonessential hunter-gatherer mode lingers. Amid corporate greed and waste, every thrifted find is a small act of rebellion.
J’reyesha Brannon, Portland
The Weight of Water
At six years old, I could not understand why my mom was so conscious about the use of water. My mother was living at my father’s farm with him, and I was living in the city with her twin sister, who was recently married. I needed to go to school, so my mother made the difficult decision of letting me go to school in the city. Every Thursday she would come to the city and spend the day with us. The following day, after school was over, my mom and I would go to the farm to spend the weekend with my father.
We would take the bus. It was a one-hour ride, but for me the time was eternal. We shared the bus with people who carried animals, fruits, and kids all in the same space. My mom would hold me with one hand, and with the other hand she would carry a big container of water, approximately four liters. This was our drinking water for the weekend. If we were lucky, we could get a place to sit. Once off the bus, we had to walk two miles to the farmhouse. If we were lucky, someone would pick us up on the way. Otherwise we had to walk, my mom carrying the heavy container of water. As a child, I did not know how heavy water was.
After we arrived, she would change her clothes and grab two empty buckets, then walk to the river, around eight hundred meters from the house. She would fill the buckets with water and walk back with one in each hand. This was done before sunset, so we could have water to make dinner and clean dishes. The next day the same ritual was done three times: once in the morning for breakfast, then for lunch, and later in the afternoon for dinner. We even took baths in the river. We were blessed to have the river that close to the property. Some people walked much longer distances than us to get water.
During the days my mother spent with us in the city, I noticed she would open the water faucet only enough for a stream of water to fall into her hand. She would turn it off while using the soap, and turn it back on again to rinse. I remember asking more than once, “Why, Mom? We have running water here!” She always replied, “Because the water we wasted today will be the thirst of tomorrow.”
Pao Córdoba, Cottage Grove
No Small Thing
“Wait!” I shouted. The person installing my screen door was going to throw away an especially choice piece of large cardboard. “Don’t throw that out! Someone I don’t know yet needs that!”
I posted the cardboard in my Buy Nothing group, and it was gone in minutes, serving a second life suppressing weeds. Months later, the same person who’d taken the cardboard offered me currants from her yard.
Time and again I see my community stepping up to meet the needs and wants of strangers, giving their possessions, time, and assistance. I have seen potlucks, tea parties, craft lessons, meals made when someone is sick, tools and equipment shared.
In the past year, my Buy Nothing group has had 16,932 posts, giving away and asking for multitudes of things. Strangest item requested? A human foot (model). Most poignant? A dahlia to plant in a memorial for a lost loved one. Some things are given frequently: clothes, pantry items, kitchen appliances. Some are seasonal: graduation gowns, zucchinis, heaters. All of it free, kept out of the stream of waste and manufacture.
I’ve been an admin in this group for five years. I see so much generosity and goodness in my community. These neighbors of mine who would rather see an item reused than thrown away. They trust they can ask for items they want, and not just items they need, knowing their neighbors value community connection more than a dollar value attached to a thing they were ready to part with.
This tiny corner of the internet brings me such joy, sometimes in the form of a gift I receive, sometimes in being able to give or lend. But in every post, I see connection. A stack of egg cartons to be reused, endless garden cardboard, side tables, books, toys, plants—all technically things. But each thing has been given or received by someone I may pass at the grocery store. After five years, I drive around town and almost every street I travel has a home where I have picked something up or dropped something off.
To trust your community, right now, in this moment, is no small thing. Beyond items, this has been the true gift of Buy Nothing. To see my neighbors as people, friends, as community tied by connection. This buying nothing thing, this tide of objects passed between neighbors, is the best thing I’ve never bought.
Stephanie La Forge, Eugene
For the Love of Wine
My wine education and my love of fine wines came from a moment in 1976. I was living in Worms, Germany, in a seventh-floor, 1,500-square-foot apartment overlooking the Liebfrauen vineyards.
My girlfriend and I were involved in theater and opera, and because we had a space where many could gather, we hosted opening and closing nights. These evenings, being celebratory in nature, meant popping corks off the balcony.
About six months after moving in, I was startled by a knock at my door. Startled, because there was only one other apartment on the floor, and I knew they were not home, nor did I hear the lift.
I opened the door to see an eighty-year-old man, tiny, with gnarled hands holding a leather bag, and on his shoulder, a leather case with four wine bottles in it and clips on the side for two glasses.
He looked up and said, “Herr Canaga! We cannot do this!” Opening the bag, he presented dozens of champagne corks.
We sat on my balcony and he pointed out where each grape varietal was grown and what it was used for, then opened a bottle and said, “This is from right there.” He pointed to a plot just below my balcony. He explained the hazards of different diseases that could be introduced by things like corks from other vineyards.
After that, he would come at least twice a month and educate me, bringing different wines from all over Germany. Sometimes he’d take us on visits to other vineyards to sample and compare.
Three years of this created an interest in wines, and as an Oregonian, a love of the wines grown here.
Robert L. Canaga, Cottage Grove
The Work of Purging
My mother was a slight woman. One hundred fifteen pounds at most. What she lacked in flesh she made up for in things—things bought and found and given to her, things stored, things saved, things forgotten. Things in plastic bins bought from Home Depot, things still in their plastic bags. Our house was dense with things. I do not remember the walls or the floors, just the amorphous things. And the feeling that I must hide them and hide in them.
She was consumed by the desire to keep, to hoard, to hold on to. She held on to anger. It turned into cancer. She held on to me when she was dying in the hospice bed, not wanting my father to finally get custody. She didn’t know how to let go until she was forced to.
Years later, at twenty-one, the direct inverse of the age I was when I last saw her, my sisters and I went through all my mother’s things. And then began the work of purging. We tried to find what was worth keeping. Very little of it was. I wanted to throw it all away, save for some vintage Indian throws and steamy love letters from her first husband.
But just because I gave her things away does not mean I was not consumed. I was consumed by her and what she meant to me; what her short, messy existence was like for her. I am consumed with not becoming her, but excavating the beautiful parts of her I faintly remember: the tan shoulders at a soccer game, the laugh in her eyes, the joy when she talked to her friends. The rest I purge and purge and purge until my own house, the one I raise my children in, is all corners and angles and sharp edges, not a thing to cushion us from all the blows.
Jordan Souza, Portland
Three Cheers for the Garter
One sunny Sunday, I took my children and their friends for an outing on the Sandy River. Rafters floated past, waving. The children did their children-at-a-river things: splashing, squealing, lobbing pebbles.
One of them noticed a snake. We gathered, staring. Then the children quickly dispersed into the river and rocks, trees and shrubs. They craved a day of haptic exploration after days of sedentary observation at school. I stayed, transfixed. Apparently the snake was undaunted by me.
The garter had grabbed a small, but slightly too large, fish. Unfortunately, it had bit it tail-first. Two-thirds of the fish’s body was gripped in the snake’s mouth, but its suffocating expanded gills were lodged like barbed awns against the garter’s teeth. Wriggling and stretching its jaw ligaments were as futile as my silent affirmations. After many minutes of effort, my striped friend slithered over to a boulder and repeatedly rammed the fish’s head into the rock, determined to force the fry past its jaw.
“Kids, come here and look!” The children ambled back, but were unimpressed. “The snake is using the boulder as a tool! I have never seen anything like this!”
One more, two more, three more bonks, and the head slipped into the snake’s throat. I threw up my hands and cheered. I had been on the garter’s side from the get-go. I felt like I had witnessed Earth’s first consumption, two billion years ago, when a microbe ate a Gunflintia cyanobacterium. Jubilant, I called to the kids, “The snake swallowed the fish!” The scattered children, like ancient unicellular organisms, did not hear.
At noon, we ate sandwiches.
Gigi Cooper, Portland
How We Came to Own a La-Z-Boy
I have never liked them. Their aesthetic is all wrong: overstuffed, clunky, too much space.
But early this spring, we found out Todd’s numbers were “elevated.” Enough to warrant a bit more data. A biopsy was ordered. This yielded numbers, letters, and symbols that changed the pace—no longer a wait-and-see, but a remove now. Between insurance and leave papers, Todd browsed Facebook Marketplace. He found the perfect chair for recovery: an overstuffed bright-red La-Z-Boy. He called the number. She said there was a lot of interest, but no buyers. “Sold,” he said. “A fun adventure,” Todd told me.
With our car, whose trunk was most certainly too small for the treasure, we ventured out. We met the sellers. She had just gotten a fresh tattoo with crisp blues and whites. He wore white socks, black sneakers, and shorts, a golf shirt carefully tucked at the waist. Today was their fortieth wedding anniversary. She said the chair no longer fit their decor. He said his surgery went well, and he no longer had cancer. “The kids are going to miss the chair,” he said, as we carefully finessed it into the car.
As we drove home, I considered the chair one of the most beautiful and hopeful items we had ever purchased.
Heather Kliever, Eugene
Comments
No comments yet.
Add a Comment