How much would you pay for a pair of bronze chicken legs? What about a broken music box that plays "You Light up My Life?" How about a cookie jar shaped like the head of an elephant?

My mother gives my brother Paul and me a pre-garage sale test, “Okay, see this jar, how much would you sell it for?”

“Well…” I begin to answer. Mom cuts me off.

“Now before you answer, notice the line running up and down it, showing that it came from a mold, see?”

The jar is filthy. Paul and I try to look beyond the layers of grime and neglect to find the line. Just below the elephant’s trunk I can see the slightly raised glass suggesting that my mother is right and this jar came from a mold, but I’m still not sure what that means. Is it a good line or a bad line? Is it valuable or insignificant? I don’t know and the pressure is mounting as Mom shoots Paul and me a smug look, certain that one of us will be right and the other will be wrong, thus relegating the wrong one to Assistant and the right one to Head of the Garage Sale.

Assigning a value to one, in many grimy chotchkies which have taken over two bedrooms in my mother’s three-bedroom home, is not an easy task. That’s why my brother and I are here, as domestic activists, to help her clear out her home so she can breathe again. It seems as if Mom has been holding her breath for years, waiting for someone to save her, a superhero to clear the clutter from her house.

And here we are, my twin brother and me, like Zan and Jayna the Wonder Twins. And I’ll say, “Twin powers activate! Form of a 200-foot long dumpster!” And Paul will say, “Shape of a 200-foot wide shovel!” And by merely clicking our fists together, Mom’s house of hoarding will vanish and in its place will be a clean home with a happy mother inside, inhaling and exhaling uncomplicated air. There’s just one problem: the value Mom places on her crap.

“Paul, Tania, why don’t you each write down what you think the price is and hand it to me.”

Both Paul and I feel pretty confident that we have each scribbled the winning answer down on the piece of paper. We both fold our figures in half and, like car sales people trying to close the deal, we hand the figure to Mom hoping that she’ll choose the right price for the glass elephant-face cookie jar.

“Okay, we have… $4 and $45.50. Who wrote $45.50?” Mom asks keeping her expression completely neutral.

“I did.” Paul says.

“Well, Paul, you’re the closest. That jar is worth $75 on eBay.”

Paul smiles at me, like he’s Mom’s favorite child. Something’s gone terribly wrong, I know that jar is worth nothing; I was just being nice by putting $4. Paul also knows that the jar is worth nothing, but he out-smarted me because we both know that Mom thinks it’s worth a million bucks. And all this talk about eBay is insane, considering Mom doesn’t even know how to turn on a computer. And the closest she’s come to eBay was when she spent time in Berkeley!

“It looks like Paul will be heading up the garage sale tomorrow,” Mom says, hugging him.

Paul leans over Mom’s shoulder, his chin pushing into her soft flesh, like a happy puppy getting ready for his mid-day feeding, looks directly into my eyes, and flips me off.

Look, I don’t care whether or not I’m the lead sales person for the garage sale tomorrow, I’m just glad that Mom is finally getting rid of her crap. This garage sale has been a long time in the making.

Growing up, we had The Room. You know the one? The room that your mother always told you not to go into? The one that you snuck into when you were 12 years old to find the mountain of boxes? The room that was the explanation as to why I had to share a room with my sister? Because of this bedroom playing the role of a storage shed, I was forced to quietly masturbate dangerously close to my little sister’s Strawberry Shortcake comforter.

Our beds were in an “L” formation my feet near her head. I would kick off my faded pink panties, straddle my black, red and white geometric patterned comforter — it was the '80s — and ride that comforter like it was a bucking bronco! With this intensive aerobics routine going on so close to my sister’s head, it was all I could do to keep quiet, smothering my face in the folds of the comforter, stifling my breath, trying not to blow my cover, or blow the covers off of me and reveal what was really going on.

Kim would whisper loudly, “Are you alright, Tania? You sound like you can’t breathe??” I would let out a muffled “stomach…ache,” all the while hoping that later in life my sister and I wouldn’t have a strained relationship.

If there were such thing as a Hoard Off, sort of like the clutter equivalent to a Bake Off, my mom would kick the crap out of everyone else’s mom. She would proudly display two of the bedrooms in her three-bedroom house, trying to open the door for the judges, turning the brass knob and with all of her 5-foot-2 ½-inch, 180-pound body leaning into the door, only to have the door push back, deny her entrance, as if the room could talk and say, “I’m full.”

And once in the room, managing to hop over a few piles, the judges would hold their clipboards against their chests, survey the room and start uncovering the things under the things in boxes on top of boxes covered in sheets wrapped in blankets and stacked high. The judges would quickly find the finest of my mother’s haute hoarding collection. Not just random crap. NO, that would be the wrong thing to say and I don’t wish to say the wrong thing about my mother’s collections.

Because I did say the wrong thing once. I said, “Mom, why don’t you get rid of all of this crap?” And she looked at me as if she were going to cry, as if I was challenging her identity, as if she needed to defend her parlous emotional pyramid and said, “It’s not crap, Tania.” And I guess the real problem comes down to lexical semantics. Whereas I define her overflowing boxes as crap, meaning: Something that is of extremely poor quality, rubbish, junk; Mom sees the contents of these boxes as survival of the fittest: The continued existence of organisms that are best adapted to their environment.

I’ll let you know how the garage sale goes in my next blog. Please wish me luck. Domestic activism is not my usual territory.