End of an Era

Last winter, I drove our vacuum cleaner that was just about as old as me down to Goodwill to be donated. Here is my little brother standing beside it just before I loaded it into the car.

It might sound silly, but I was felt kind of sentimental about donating it.

Not to sound schmaltzy, but I have many memories of this vacuum cleaner throughout my childhood. This one was used back at my dad's office when we lived in southeast Texas.

I can remember using it for years there, and we also had an identical one at home. When I was six years old and my mother was expecting my younger sister, I tried to vacuum the house for her, but it was taller than I was, and my little arms struggled to push it across the floor. It ended up that the handle slipped out of my grip and fell on my knee that I'd badly scraped a few days before. Blood suddenly started flowing out from underneath my bandage. Hearing my shrieks, my mother quickly came and rushed me into the kitchen to rebandage it. Being young and tending to exaggerate things, my rather active imagination that the blood was gushing out of my leg. It was a while before I attempted to subdue that nasty vacuum cleaner again.

We ended up purchasing a new vacuum for the house about three years later, but we kept the one from the office for several more years. It traveled with us when we moved to western Colorado, to the Dallas Metroplex area, and back to eastern Colorado. We even had its cord replaced at a Dallas repair shop. I thought that things had come "full circle" in a sense when we started using it in my dad's new office.

However, the time finally came when the suction just wasn't enough to really clean the carpets well anymore. It was a faithful machine...it must have been almost two decades old. This may sound a little strange, but it felt like the end of an era for me in some ways.  Another one of my childhood monsters faded into a memory.  The new vacuum works much better, though.