Much of our furniture is the same way--from second-hand shops or picked up off the side of the street.
When I moved from Columbus, in my final few days in the house, I filled the narrow strip of grass between the street and the sidewalk with stuff I couldn't take with me, didn't feel was important enough to keep and store, but it still had lots of use in it so I couldn't throw it away--furniture, dishes, clothing, shoes, all in piles that ended up being almost shoulder-high. People came from the neighborhood and the slightly-less-well-off apartment complexes down the street to assimilate many of these items into their own lives.
The last full day I was in the house, I put out on the stacks the shallow saucepan (with its tight-fitting lid) I'd used to cook my rice nearly every day for the past 4 or 5 years. Within minutes, I saw a woman pick it up and add it to the stack of things she carried in her arms. And I went back inside and sat down on the couch (also a hand-me-down, from Kay's mom's house, soft and cushy with one small cigarette hole in its blue corduroy covering), and the enormity of what I was doing suddenly hit me, and I cried, loudly and miserably, for a solid half-hour.
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When I moved from Columbus, in my final few days in the house, I filled the narrow strip of grass between the street and the sidewalk with stuff I couldn't take with me, didn't feel was important enough to keep and store, but it still had lots of use in it so I couldn't throw it away--furniture, dishes, clothing, shoes, all in piles that ended up being almost shoulder-high. People came from the neighborhood and the slightly-less-well-off apartment complexes down the street to assimilate many of these items into their own lives.
The last full day I was in the house, I put out on the stacks the shallow saucepan (with its tight-fitting lid) I'd used to cook my rice nearly every day for the past 4 or 5 years. Within minutes, I saw a woman pick it up and add it to the stack of things she carried in her arms. And I went back inside and sat down on the couch (also a hand-me-down, from Kay's mom's house, soft and cushy with one small cigarette hole in its blue corduroy covering), and the enormity of what I was doing suddenly hit me, and I cried, loudly and miserably, for a solid half-hour.