Yes that is Gina, standing in an empty driveway in front of a clean house and cheering.

Getting out the door for this journey was a lot of work! Although we had agreed to rent our home furnished to cut out the labor of moving, we realized eventually this simply meant the furniture would stay. Our stuff – so much stuff – would still need to go. The lovely family coming to live there would have their own belongings and would need places for all of them.  Plus we had a long list of fix-ups – inevitable in an old house – that needed attention.

We raced to clear out all the rooms, dust and scrub every surface, fix all the loose door knobs and broken window weights, and get the lawn in order.

Every one of our non-furniture worldly possessions has now ended up in: (a) a suitcase; (b) two dedicated closets in the home; (c) the Salvation Army; or (d) the trash.

The plan included leaving behind an empty garage. We decided to sell our cars. No time for an auction process though. We simply called the Lexus dealer a couple of weeks ago and asked for an offer by phone. They looked up the VINs and offered us $22K for our 2007 ES350 (vs. $43K original price four years ago) and $5K for our 2000 RX300 (ten years old). Great!

At T-3 days, Carter and I went to the Lexus dealership to drop off the ES sedan. The dealer took the keys and trotted out to the parking lot, never to return. What could he be doing? I crept over to the window.

There he was outside in the sunshine, crouched at the front of my car. Lips were pursed. Possibly a vein throbbed at his temple. True, the front fender – they are all made of plastic these days – was cracked open. If you work and drive in Cambridge then you know this is the norm. Especially at E Ink, where each parking space has a cement bar at its head, installed by the former tenant against employees who might otherwise bash their cars against the walls of the office building before they parked and staggered inside. Those cement railroad ties were a particular hazard to the low undercarriage of my ES350. Were we about to come home with an unsold car and the flight just 72 hours away? I returned to my seat.

“Mr. Wilcox sorry to say we can’t come anywhere close to what I offered you. The fenders are shot and you’ve got dents all over. And if we replace three-quarters of the panels the paint will never be right. We can’t sell this car here. So it will be going to auction. And auction is bad these days. Why just yesterday I paid $22K for a 2008 E350 and took it to auction and no one offered more than $18 to 19K. And that was a 2008! Yours is only a 2007 and I won’t even get that much for it.”

Well, you can see where this was headed. We did not argue for a long time. I had a stuffed dresser and a messy study waiting for attention at home. It was time to live as light and free as we could – one suitcase and one carry-on per person and no cars. We shook hands on $22.5K for both cars and he returned with a cut check. After that it was simple enough to log into the RMV to register a plate cancellation – a matter of minutes online and you just crumple up the plates at home – email the plate notice to the insurance company and be done.

We had completed the boxing and liquidation of nearly all our possessions, dings and all.