I was walking in my neighborhood the other day.

Even though it wasn’t a big moving day, it seemed that people were preparing to move.  (Or, perhaps, they were tantalized by summer blow-out sales and were practicing the “out with the old” part of the adage, in anticipation of “make way for the new.”)

In other words, I saw a lot of furniture in the alley.

I saw the occasional YARD SALE sign, but mostly I saw couches, mattresses, shelving, and rocking chairs near the sides of buildings.

Yard sales take a lot of work.  Items have to be sorted and displayed. Prices need to be considered.   The word needs to be spread.

There is always FREECYCLE,  Goodwill, and other opportunities for deliberately finding a new home for something you don’t want any more, but, in Chicago, there’s always the alley.

The ALLEY works in mysterious ways.

In most neighborhoods, alleys run behind houses and connect garages to side streets. They also keep garbage cans off front lawns.  If you looked at traffic channels as a circulatory system, alleys would be like capillaries.

They’re the thinnest surface that can accommodate cars.  Like capillaries, they connect higher traffic channels, arteries.  As capillaries bring oxygenated blood to organs, alleys make kitchen door deliveries of new appliances possible.  As capillaries are responsible for removing waste and carbon dioxide, garbage trucks use alleys so they can haul things away.

In Chicago, alleys are also a mysterious treasure chest and re-distributor of property.

If you don’t want something, just prop it up in the alley. Eighty percent of the time, someone will claim it. Perhaps, it will be taken by someone for their own use or possibly, they know of flea markets or other interested buyers for the exact type of thing that you want to send off into the universe.

When I was a kid, we used to refer to the people that combed the alleys for finds as garbage pickers.  It seemed that the profession was populated by crazy old ladies pushing shopping carts that they dragged off from grocery store parking lots and filled with things they fancied.

They seemed to plan their exploratory trips between the houses the day before trash was to be collected.

Now, the operation is much more sophisticated.  Pairs, driving an old pickup truck, would cruise slowly down alleys and take away furniture or mattresses, cookware — all sorts of things.  They probably have favorite blocks or territories based on their collection history.

I know that when I leave something in the alley, I’ll look out the window periodically to see if it has been taken.  After checking behind my home and seeing nothing’s been taken, I might have a have a silly reaction.

Whadd’ya mean, my trash is not good enough for anybody?…

Then, a day later, a discarded corner desk or lamp would be gone, and I’d feel RELIEF.

I love the way the ALLEY has taught me about letting go.

You go through a process of saying good-bye to an object that was probably part of your life for a long time. You have to accept whatever happens to the object once it is given to the ALLEY.

It might get snapped up right away. Or, it might linger.  It might actually get picked up by a waste collection vehicle.

There is an old saying. “One man’s trash is another man’s treasure.”

While it seems that our culture values “newness” over other qualities (What iteration of iPhone are we on now?) and that we are eager to produce things that are not really needed and support whole industries aimed at convincing people they must buy something, it’s nice to remember that different people value different things for different reasons.

Some people would be happy with last year’s style of sweater if it’s warm.  Some families would welcome a couch that they could all fit on to watch TV even if the color doesn’t match their walls.

I love it that donating something to a charity resale shop or making an offering to the alley is a way to let the universe redistribute things to where they might be most appreciated.

That alleys can act as a wonderful re-distributor, a showroom, a superstore of sorts, which require no down payments and no confusing credit terms, is no small thing.