Coming back into focus
Thrifting through burnout, grief and environmental collapse
Fellow thrifters, scrappers, alley shoppers, Buy Nothing fiends and everyone else who lovingly tolerates us! Hello.
It’s been over 15 months since I updated you all.
Here’s what’s been happening in my corner since I last sent out a Curb Alert:
1) Burnout. In the spring of 2023 I was working relentlessly long hours and took on too many projects (including a story package — here and here — on the circular/sharing economy). At the same time, my caretaking duties intensified: my daughter, then 4, had ongoing pooping problems that reduced me to an undies-scrubbing maniac, and my elderly mother, who lived in the apartment above us in our duplex, broke her wrist, then severely sprained her ankle, and then developed a mysterious gastrointestinal ailment that confined her in bed for most of the summer. I stopped writing altogether and went into survival mode. My rosacea flared and any self-confidence I had drained out of me. I’m still digging my way out.
2) Burning world. Remember the summer of 2023, the hottest on record? (Until this year, probably. The good old days!) While I was burning out, we were all burning up. Smoke from wildfires in Canada swept over the Great Lakes and hung low over Milwaukee for several weeks, choking the air, canceling summer events and concerts, and ultimately killing dozens of people across the state. How do you explain to two delighted young kids that actually it’s not normal to picnic on a blanket laid out on the living room floor, with all the windows shut and an air purifier whirring, because the outside air would make you sick? Every day I was reading reports of bleaching coral, floods that drowned whole neighborhoods and microplastics sneaking into every cell of the human body. I read Jeff Goodell’s “The Heat Will Kill You First: Life and Death on a Scorched Planet” and felt deeply apocalyptic.
3) Fighting the scourge of plastic (and losing). Of all the books I read in 2023, the one that had the biggest impact on me was Eve O. Schaub’s “Year of No Garbage: Recycling Lies, Plastic Problems, and One Woman’s Trashy Journey to Zero Waste.” It’s a must-read for understanding why we’re in deep shit with plastic. I was already pretty committed to avoiding disposable plastics and consuming only secondhand goods, and now I am even more so. Because I live here in the real world, not inside an influencer video making cornflakes from scratch, this journey I’m on is imperfect and messy (ie., sometimes I buy McDonald’s and like it, and I’ve hit pause on caring about those stupid plastic clamshells berries come in because berries are one of the few fruits or vegetables my son will eat).
4) My mom died. It feels disrespectful and strange to have this just be another item on a list, but that’s the brutal truth of death, especially a sudden and unexpected death like hers. One day you’re taking your mom to urgent care and five hours later you’re driving home alone with her backpack and coat on the passenger seat. It’s disorienting and surreal but also so mundane. It hurts. Her (beautifully decorated) apartment has become a storage zone for my various Buy Nothing giveaways and dumpster diving hauls. Very slowly, I am also going through her things, learning about her and remembering as I go, and deciding what to keep and what to give away or sell. She led an incredible life.
5) Kittens. OK, so something good had to happen, right? We adopted a pair of kittens, two sisters! I wanted their names to be Thelma and Louise and tried for the better part of a year to make that happen, but was ultimately overruled by my 6-year-old twins who insisted on Pearl and Clam. I recently gave up on my Thelma and Louise campaign, so now these cats are Pearl and Clam, for real. Princess Pearl and Clammer Jammer. Burly Pearly and Clam Bam Thank You Ma’am. They are such rapscallions!
And through it all, I’m still out here in these streets thrifting
The whole time, I never stopped doing my little alley strolls and Buy Nothing porch pickups/dropoffs. It probably saved my sanity, in fact.
Inevitably, I joined the admin team of my neighborhood Buy Nothing group. (Turns out if you spend every day in a Facebook group, you might get asked to help manage it.) As Buy Nothing has gone mainstream, the group has grown to over 10,000 members. Being an admin sometimes feels like a part-time job, and a thankless one at that. But I believe wholeheartedly in the “keep stuff out of the landfill” mission and I’ve continued to have life-affirming interactions through the group.
Because I’m pretty much at max capacity for personal belongings at the moment (which is a whole psychological state worth examining, tbh), I’m focused mostly giving away stuff these days.
Lately I’ve also been having fun giving away (and sometimes selling) the goodies I score from the trash and clean up. Just a few recent examples I can remember off the top of my head…
an art student’s entire collection of professional-grade art supplies, including a Wacom tablet
A collection of the most gorgeous handsewn harem pants you’ve ever seen
A couple of large Coleman coolers
Five new-in-box, pristine-condition bicycle inner tubes
Bags and bags of clothes, many still with tags
A FluidStance balance board in great condition (retails at $179, excuse me?!)
So many kids toys, including Barbies and a mostly new-in-package Crazy Trax gears/marble run game
Shout out to The Outfit Repeater and the Gem app!
Curb Alert was recently featured in a Gem app roundup of “Nine Substacks for Vintage Lovers and Secondhand Shoppers,” thanks to a recommendation from Hannah Rupp, aka The Outfit Repeater.
I met Hannah years ago when I profiled her for the newspaper where I was working at the time. She is a fashion freelancer and thrift stylist who collects 1980s/early 1990s clothes and memorabilia. I love her colorful style! And I’m so grateful for her kind rec as well as to Liisa Jokinen and the Gem app for the cool write-up.
Gem is a one-stop search platform that brings together and curates vintage and secondhand clothing shopping across the internet. Right now I’m eying the jumpsuit section (over 300,000 options before filtering!) because I just have a feeling this is the year I’m finally going to find the vintage jumpsuit of my dreams.
See you next week
It feels good to finally take the time to write you all. I’ve missed this. Today is my birthday, and I can’t imagine a better birthday present to myself than reviving Curb Alert. I swear on the Craigslist free section to never again let this newsletter go fallow so long.
Love to you, Kat!
Thank you for sharing all of this with us. So good to see you writing again!