Immediately after writing solemnly yesterday that I was finished with decluttering, I went down to the cellar to put a tool away, and found myself dragging one of my pretty no-longer-used wooden IKEA carts out front with a “FREE” sign taped to it. (I put it in front of the vacant corner house, because I do not want to be seen as the source of all the free stuff. That leads to being a target for burglary.)

Apparently I wasn’t completely finished decluttering. I may never be finished. It’s so much fun giving away all the things I so painstakingly accumulated all my life.

Later in the day, my young neighbor Charlie knocked on my door asking me if I wanted to go for a walk. I had already been for a walk, so I invited him inside and we chatted for a while. He is a sweet white dude in his mid-twenties, a rower who used to live in New York City; he told me he might be getting laid off from his job soon, and he was walking around the neighborhood handing out flyers for a basement-clearing gig he is going to start. He just bought himself a pickup truck after his car got stolen, and he figured he might as well put it to use.

I showed him my own cleared-out basement, with pride. He saw the other IKEA cart that was still there, and said he had taken one of them from in front of a neighbor’s house. I told him I was the source, and when he went home again he sent me a photo of the cart with a print of Van Gogh’s “Sunflowers” on the wall above it; “It really ties the room together,” he said, in inadvertent echo of “The Big Lebowski.” Well, it does. It looks very nice indeed.

So I am discarding things, and Charlie, in his acquisitive youth, is acquiring them. The circle of life, I guess.

How can Charlie, a 25-year-old with an impending layoff on his horizon and an expensive hobby, who is scavenging furniture, afford a new truck and own a renovated house that sold for half a million dollars, in a thoroughly gentrified area?

His mom, that’s how. I met his mother when she moved him in. She and her husband own a big landscaping company. They bought him a house in an area that, according to another neighbor across the street, suddenly has beat cops on the big thoroughfare a block up.

Philadelphia has cops, but they are on a soft strike against the progressive district attorney and have been for years. And I have never seen a beat cop here, in all my life. They are always in their cars, using my street as a shortcut, chasing someone who shot someone else. I suspect our councilman and our state representative pulled some serious strings. I suspect the gentrification of the area pulled hard on those strings, too.

If the city didn’t have some tax programs for people like me who are living on savings and Social Security, I couldn’t afford to live here now.

I have in fact lived here for twenty years, and it’s unnerving to watch my scruffy neighborhood turn into people like Charlie. Charlie’s awfully nice, mind you. And yeah, my husband and I bought our kid a house a long while back. It wasn’t renovated, and it cost us a tenth of what Charlie’s mom paid for his house, but we still bought a house for our kid. So I can’t talk.

Another young neighbor from around the corner told me yesterday he’s graduating soon from college. He was the one who cleaned up the snow for me on the day of our little blizzard. He’s someone’s kid. He grew up around the corner, in a family crammed six or seven into a two-story row house. “I had to take a break from school,” my young neighbor informed me. “I wasn’t serious.” I seem to recall while he wasn’t being serious, he was doing some of the dope dealing at the end of that block for a while. Still a sweet guy, though. And his mom supports him, too, she just supports him with a spare bed or maybe a sofa in her Philadelphia Housing Authority house.

“Took me six years to graduate from college,” I said, and we grinned at one another.

I recall that I only finished college because my grandmother paid for it, now that I think back. And the main reason I own a house now is that my mother gave me her ramshackle house, after she moved into her mother’s house when my grandmother died.

Pass it along. Give it away. “That’s what the money is for,” I used to tell my husband when he was worried we weren’t being sufficiently careful with our finances.