Tomorrow is Bulky Items Day in my neighborhood, a kind of Christmas-in-reverse where, no matter what you stick out on the curb, the trash collectors have to haul it away.

It couldn't come at a better time. I've been on a cleaning frenzy since New Years. I throw away, recycle, or donate to charity a bag of unwanted stuff a day. But there are bulky items, things that I don't want or need, things too crappy or deranged to give away, and I only have one day a year to dish it off.

I've been preparing for weeks. One pile is for yard waste, one pile for garbage. I have pulled, pruned, cut, raked, hacked, dug up and hatcheted everything. I have put out fourteen bags of yard waste. Fourteen bags of dead things, dry things, spiny things, viny things, prickly things, weeds that grow like cancers, virulent and deadly.

And then the junk pile. Three rooms of hideous pink-grey indoor outdoor carpeting, yards of scarred yellow and white linoleum, strips and strips of thin wood with rows of protruding carpet-tack teeth, reptilian and dangerous. A dishwasher with nearly half of the pointy-up dish-holders snapped off. A toilet with a slow leak from a cracked tank and blue paint dripped down one side. A tattered arm chair covered in orange crushed velvet (the seventies were troubled, troubled times). A bureau that I bought at K-Mart when Charlie was born, assembled it myself, painted it yellow and blue and red -- but Charlie is twelve now, and besides the drawers never fit the runners, and the particle-board bottoms dropped out of them every time you put so much as a pair of jeans inside. Yards of flecked Formica countertop. A stained enamel kitchen sink. The boxes and Styrofoam packing material to computers and stereos I don't even own any more. Four bald snowtires.

Have it out by 7 AM, the notice says, so I piled it all out there, all afternoon. I stood on my front porch and looked at the two enormous mounds of trash. They looked like giant breasts, voluptuous, diseased. I hope they come right at 7 AM. I am embarrassed that the neighborhood, the world can see -- the wheezing pain of my dead marriage, the quirky otherness of my dead parents, my mortifying failures stacked on the curb...bad mother, bad daughter, bad wife.

Inside the house my new wood floors shine under wet, sharp-smelling varethane. The furniture -- what little I have left -- is still crammed in the garage. The house is so empty it echoes. I remember the day we moved in. I sat on the bare floors with a phone plugged in the jack, waiting for the van to come. Danny, then only a year old, pulled out the bottom drawer in the kitchen and stepped inside. Then he pulled out the top drawer, whacked himself in the head, fell over on his ass -- and laughed.

I'm moving in again. This time it will be my house. This time it's home. I love the way laughter echoes in an empty house.