As usual, Eliza Senoufou comes up with the mot juste -- a fye-out. I feel as if I have been fying out our lives for the last year, and I'm damn' well ready to be done with it. Himself is so ready to be done with it that he now automatically digs in his heels at every new proposal to disembarrass ourselves further.

I keep thinking I have finally unpacked the final box from the move, only to find another lurking on a shelf or in a corner, pretending to be something else.

Yesterday it was a large carton that once held a vacuum cleaner, sitting on a shelf in the garage. At first I thought it was empty, kept against the day when the vacuum cleaner might require repair, but then it occurred to me that it might contain framed pictures or other ornaments that we had no room for and had therefore stashed in the basement of our house in Ottawa. (We both inherited many framed items from our deceased parents, and acquired many more over the years -- and then got married and multiplied the problem.) So I hauled it into the house and pried it open, and what do you think I found?

No, not a forgotten Rembrandt, or even a neglected set of dishes. It was a dead vacuum cleaner, the wreckage of the Hoover central vac we gave up on in Ottawa when the manufacturer went bankrupt and we could no longer get parts. Dang! How did that escape my decluttering efforts before the move? This enquiring mind really wants to know.

So out it goes to the landfill next garbage day, at the cost of two City of Stratford garbage tickets.

As for the excess art, our new church has a potential solution. In Spring, St. James's holds its annual "variety sale" -- what we Anglicans used to call a rummage sale. People like us abound in this prosperous town, one of Canada's top retirement destinations (honest, we didn't know until we got here!), so Stratford basements abound in decorative items that have not found display space. So an enterprising member of the congregation, who just happens to be a retired curator, collects paintings, graphics and objets de vertu and organizes them for sale to the benefit of the parish, which has a handsome Victorian church complete with ring of bells to support, not to speak of its real work in the community, and needs every penny it can scrape up.

Now all I have to do is persuade Himself that we can contribute a significant stack of framed items. Wish me luck with that.