The Storage Unit That Cost More Than the Rent

A storage unit seemed like a kind way to wait.

By Neil Solomon · 3 min read

"I have the key on my ring," Noreen said. "I look at it every time I start the car."

She was sitting at her friend Ivy's table with a cup of coffee going cold. Noreen is 67. Eleven years ago she cleared her mother's house and her own family home in the same summer, and she could not bear to sort either one. A storage unit seemed like a kind way to wait. The unit was ten feet by ten feet, and it cost US$150 a month. That figure is an illustration, and real prices differ from town to town.

For the first five years she went every few months. For the last six she has not gone once. The payment still leaves her account on the first of every month.

Ivy took a pencil and wrote on the back of an envelope.

Noreen looked at the number for a while. "Nearly twenty thousand dollars," she said. "And in five years I will be 72, and it will be nearly twenty-nine thousand."

Ivy added a line under the table. As another illustration, a one-bedroom apartment in a mid-priced retirement town might rent for about US$900 a month. At that price, US$19,800 is 22 months of rent.

"Do you know what is in there?"

"Mostly. My mother's sewing machine. Boxes of my son's school drawings. My sister's good coats." Noreen stopped. "I have two fears, Ivy. One is that it is all junk, and I have paid twenty thousand dollars to protect junk. The other is that it is not junk. Then I would have to feel all of it at once."

Ivy did not try to talk her out of either fear. She asked a smaller question. "If we only drove there? Nobody goes in. We just lift the door."

On Thursday they stood in front of unit 42 under a white sky. Noreen's hands shook so much that Ivy turned the key. The door rolled up with a long metal rattle, and the smell of old cardboard came out. Boxes were stacked to the ceiling. Noreen stood very still.

Then she saw the label on the nearest box, in her own handwriting from eleven years before: Kitchen towels (nice).

She laughed first. Then she put her hand over her mouth and cried, and Ivy held her elbow and said nothing. After ten minutes Noreen carried that one box to the car, and they locked the door again. She did not cancel the unit. She marked the first of next month on the calendar as the day she and Ivy would decide whether to open a second box.