The Phoenix Diaries: The Chapter Where I Found A Béarnaise Sauce Packet From 2015 And Had To Lie Down

In which I sort through the archaeology of a family home and decide I want to own approximately six things in this second act.

Phoenix Diaries
Personal stories of transformation, heartbreak, and rebuilding from ground zero.

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There are currently seven half-empty paint cans in the hallway.

Three mattresses leaning against the walls like exhausted relatives. Enough tangled charging cables to resurrect a small electronics store from 2007.

Somewhere under a pile of old blankets, I found a charger for a Nokia.

A Nokia.

Nobody in this family knows how to throw anything out. We are deeply, committedly sentimental about objects that haven’t been relevant since dial-up internet.

I’m back in Canada for a little while, staying at my mum’s house while she’s away in Ireland visiting friends. My siblings recently moved out, and before she left, we made grand plans.

“A bit of a purge,” she said. “Freshen the place up. Maybe paint a few rooms.”

You know. The lies people tell before opening the hall closet.

Now here I am, standing in the middle of a house I’ve never lived in, sorting through the physical remains of other people’s lives.

And Christ alive, there is stuff everywhere.

The deeply random archaeology of family homes.

Single shoes with no known partner.
Expired batteries kept for reasons lost to time.
Forty-seven reusable shopping bags stuffed inside another reusable shopping bag, like some sort of environmental Russian doll.
A decorative bowl on the kitchen counter that I have been informed, with some urgency, nobody is allowed to touch.

Every drawer feels emotionally loaded.

I pick up an old receipt, a chipped mug, or a béarnaise sauce packet from 2015, and suddenly it’s not about the object anymore. It’s about the life around it. The version of someone who bought it. The season they were in. The things they kept meaning to deal with and never did.

Over time, a home becomes a trail of unfinished decisions.

I’ve also noticed how differently people leave places. Some carefully clear themselves out like respectful little ghosts. Others disappear and leave behind seventeen tote bags, a broken lamp, and what feels like the emotional residue of several unresolved arguments. No judgement. Humans are messy creatures. We leave fingerprints everywhere.

Standing here surrounded by piles of things people no longer wanted, I kept feeling this tightness in my chest. The walls themselves felt like they were shouting.

For almost twenty months, I’ve been travelling with very little. A suitcase. A few clothes. My laptop. Books. Tiny pieces of home tucked into temporary spaces across countries and continents.

And somewhere along the way, travel changed my relationship with ownership in ways I’m still working out.

When you carry your life through airports often enough, you start asking different questions.

Do I need this?
Do I even want this?
Why does having more feel heavier instead of better?

Photo by Harper Sunday on Unsplash

The truth is, I don’t miss most of what I used to own. The extra dishes. The decorative storage baskets. The ten thousand useful things we convince ourselves are essential because adulthood apparently becomes one long side quest for better drawer organizers.

A few days ago, I went to IKEA with a friend because she needed flower pots and a couple of bits for her place.

Now, historically, IKEA was never a casual outing for me. It was an Olympic event. You’d go in for tealight candles and somehow leave four hundred dollars poorer, clutching sixteen storage baskets, a plant named Sven, and a sudden unshakeable belief that a bamboo bathroom shelf was the missing key to inner peace.

Classic IKEA delusion. I fell for it every single time.

But this visit felt different.

We were halfway through the marketplace section, surrounded by fake kitchens and couples silently arguing over lamp shades, when she stopped, looked at me and said, “You’re glad you don’t have to buy any of this stuff anymore.”

And without even thinking, I said, “God, yes.”

Because for the first time in my adult life, I walked through IKEA and felt absolutely no desire to own any of it. No urge to upgrade my life through throw pillows. No fantasy about becoming the kind of woman who alphabetizes pasta in matching jars. No emotional pull toward a side table called something impossible to pronounce.

I left feeling lighter than when I walked in, which has never happened to me at IKEA and honestly felt like a spiritual achievement.

What I remember from the last twenty months are moments.

Dancing at Carnival in Madeira.
Rain on a French café window while eating the best pastry of my life.
Meditating with Monks in Thailand.
Laughing with strangers who became friends faster than made any logical sense. Conversations that arrived at exactly the right time and cracked something open.

That’s the stuff that stayed.

I kept things from my dad after he passed. Small pieces of him, objects connected to memory and love that I will carry forever. Those matter in a way that’s beyond explanation.

But the rest of it — the unconscious accumulation, the keeping things because nobody taught us how not to — that feels like noise. Like filling emotional space with physical objects because it was easier than sitting with the space itself.

There’s something clarifying about standing in the middle of someone else’s accumulated life while your own fits in a suitcase in the corner.

Because one day, someone will have to go through my things, too.

That thought alone makes me want to own about six items and a really good coat.

My mum’s generation kept things because security meant ownership. A full house meant you’d made it. You saved the good china for occasions that never quite arrived and held onto things for a later that kept getting postponed.

For me, right now, freedom feels more luxurious than a full cupboard.

The freedom to move. To leave. To wake up and book a flight without wondering what to do with three cupboards full of serving platters and a decorative bowl nobody is allowed to touch.

Tonight I carried another donation bag out to the car while the sun dropped through the trees.

Standing in the driveway, sweaty, dusty, slightly exhausted, questioning every life choice that led me to sorting through twenty-seven mystery cables on a Tuesday afternoon, I thought about what I actually want my life to look like.

Lighter than this.

With a lot more room for living in it.

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Tell me…

What's the most unhinged thing you've ever found while doing a purge? The béarnaise sauce packet needs company. Share in the comments.

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