12/17/2019
Our job description sometimes includes donating or throwing away important and sentimental items from your home. We understand it is hard, but we do like learning about different things through our clients. We are happy to hear about the things we are taking away. We can find out more about the item’s condition and potential for donating. Personally, it’s nice to hear so many wonderful stories on our diverse jobs all around Philadelphia and its surrounding regions.
Recently the Junk Junction team met an extraordinary woman named Ruth. Her home was beautiful and spacious, but she was now living alone and needed to downsize to lift some housekeeping burdens. The first thing our crew noticed when we walked in was how most of the walls were lined with neatly packed bookshelves. There was more than a few days’ worth of materials to remove with all of Ruth’s storage and books alone. To save time, we began by organizing the garage and staging what we knew was going there first.
Since Ruth’s children follow in her adventurous footsteps, they live in different parts of the world. Unfortunately this left Ruth alone to sort her belongings, so our team assisted her by pulling things out in plain sight and working with her to set aside essentials. We also had our work cut out for us searching for magazines and the small items we were told to remove when found. We had another section for important documents that needed to be sent to a shred company as well. Finally, we had to keep watch for books, documents and records from Ruth’s enduring career so they could be archived by Drexel University.
A little while after working for Ruth, she told us she was a Midwife. She’s modest, but after some questions, we learned that she was actually the first Midwife in Pennsylvania. She is an American pioneer in her practice, for both introducing and improving the nature of the profession. Ruth wants every mother and every child to get the best possible treatment, and she even brought her work to the forefront of the Civil Rights movement in the 1960’s. While already teaching breastfeeding and other infant care classes to new mothers, she advocated for African-American mothers to be integrated into the classes. We saw pictures of her first black patient holding a healthy baby girl and the first ever black baby doll used for breastfeeding instruction. Ruth is truly passionate about midwifing and still helps maintain different organizations for Midwives to discuss changes and improvements to their practice and meet socially. Now, Ruth is donating all of her life’s work to Drexel University so it can all be preserved in their archives.
Even with patients she hadn’t seen in decades, she could still recall stories about them and it was truly comforting to hear from someone who really loved their career and hear her to still get so excited over it. She even had stories about her family, who are all out in the world doing wonderful things. We heard a lot about her late husband, whom she called “brilliant.” Nobody doubted her since he also had a considerable amount of work from his career in Mathematics with the University of Pennsylvania. Everything was pleasant about our time with Ruth besides her finding it harder to say goodbye to certain things. We made sure to take our time with her and do things the right way, while still getting her ready to put her house on the market in time for the summer.
There was a lot to do, starting upstairs. A few rooms had been repurposed for storage after Ruth’s children moved out. She also had her office upstairs, which required careful sorting because of the Drexel materials. Some of the rooms with storage also had eaves which we had to crawl into and retrieve boxes for Ruth to check. Methodically, we worked on clearing each room before starting with the basement. The basement took more than a day, with all of the magazines, books, old clothes and everything else that needed discarding. During this process, Ruth was even able to find a few books she was hoping to pass down to their children and a quilt she knitted by hand.
Our team soldiered through it, and we are obviously grateful for business but also for the chance to meet Ruth and learn from her, talking about wherever her things brought her back to. Since she will probably not need any more of our services after her move, we are happy to remember our experience with her in this article and hopefully share some of her cheer. Her quick wit kept us on our toes, and I have to admit, there actually is tension lifted whenever Ruth would decide to trash something and toss it calling, “Off with its head!” She went above and beyond to be a good host and even recommended and gifted a stack of books to one of our bookworm-ish workers.
Ruth, it was an absolute pleasure meeting you, and from John, Shane and Tom at Junk Junction, we wish you the best of luck to you on your move. It goes without saying that if you can think up a little job at the new place sometime, we would love to catch up.
