Farewell to Chaos

You find the darnedest things when you do a clean out. I found this note down in the fish tank zone. Studied it for a few seconds. Then it came to me. This Post-it came with a beautiful ruby-throated hummingbird, grounded by a window strike. I named her Lily and kept her in a 20 gallon long glass tank, set up for a handicapped hummingbird, for part of a year before her condition deteriorated to the point where her quality of life was unacceptably low. Oh, how I loved her, and how she broke my heart. Flightless hummingbirds are a rough ride for their would-be saviors. By the way, I didn’t wind up needing to rub her head to get her to eat from the feeder. :)

This shirt came to me from the estate of Lois Darling. I’ve never taken it off the cardboard, because I’m so charmed at the thought of a shirt (1960’s size 16, junior, which corresponds to about a 6 in adult) that has never been worn, that has marginally socially acceptable decorations, that is frozen in time. Turner Togs, wash’n’wear!

As noted before, the animus of my kids’ favorite toys, especially stuffed animals, keeps me from tossing many of them. These were the winners, who all went into a big cardboard box for safekeeping. The Airedale was especially intriguing to Curtis. He kept sniffing its butt and muzzle, unable to believe it wasn’t real. He liked the dachshund Beanie too. The stuffed skunk evoked an interested reaction from this twice-sprayed dog. 

Promise me you won’t get rid of these, Mether.
  I promise, Curtis.
As the cleansing progressed, Curtis spent more and more time in the basement with me. I would turn around and find him there, tail waving, ready to give me a good wallerin’ hug. Not that I’d need it...

Curtis Loew is very gentle with his toys. He hasn’t so much as frayed one of them since February. So I felt confident letting him carry my Good Cat around. I don’t remember who gave me Good Cat, but we called it that because it was white, so it was too “good” to go outside with me. I was forever outside as a kid, so I needed rules like that. Curt wanted to take Good Cat outside, but the rules Ida made still hold. 

Good Cat went in a box with First Bear and Woof Woof. Somewhere there’s a photo of Ida’s mom, Frieda Ruigh, holding First Bear when she came to our house in South Dakota to meet me as a newborn infant. I’m not sure who gave me Woof Woof but I wouldn’t be surprised if it was Frieda. I’m pretty sure she brought me Good Cat, as well. I discern her taste in all of them. 

I packed them away, together, so they wouldn’t be lonely. Some things you can’t throw away.

Meanwhile, the garage was getting fuller and fuller. Load after load grunted up the hill in the garden cart. Trash to the right, good stuff to the left. 

I was working toward my deadline of 9 AM December 4, when ReStore would come with their biggest van to haul away the things people might be able to use, or would want to collect. 

Here they’re loading Bill’s beer-brewing equipment, which he used exactly twice, then stored for a couple of decades, along with dozens and dozens of Grolsch bottles. The guys knew someone who’d want it all. That made me very happy. Good bye, enjoy your second life!

After the huge van left with all the good stuff, my intrepid junk haulers Dave (here) and Bob (below) packed the rest in two pickups and a flatbed trailer for runs to recycling and dump. 

I filled my Subaru, and not for the first time, with stuff that wouldn’t fit in the trucks. I still fill it pretty much every time I go to town with donations for Goodwill.

Bob packed everything so carefully, almost lovingly. But in a few hours, they too were gone. 

Bye, futon mattress that I couldn’t lift by myself. You’ll weigh down the load.

I stood and watched the last of that junk make its way down the driveway. What a feeling!

Goodbye, junk. Goodbye, for good.

Hello, garage I can park in again.

I took Curtis for a walk at sunset, feeling lighter all over. There was still at least a week of work to do to clean, but now I could move around enough to do it. 

The sky was on fire. So were all my bones and joints. It was a good sore, an exhausted, happy sore. I was so glad I did this while I still physically could. I did it alone, because nobody could have helped me sort and mull and mourn; nobody could work through the detritus of 27 years and three other lives but me, the one who loved them all. 

Treasures in the Dross

The stuff we save. 

Bill worked for a NYC ad agency called Ogilvie and Mather right out of college. One of his biggest projects was publicizing and celebrating the 50th birthday of DC Comics' Superman. He saved dozens upon dozens of copies of the Daily News announcing the event. Two would have done it just fine. But we had many, many pounds of them.

Box after box of Superman memorabilia all jumbled up with personal stuff and junk and...

You know how when you start cleaning out your refrigerator and you find something that is so hideously horrifying it's kind of beautiful? I think this was tomato-based at one time. Now it's a landscape.

Well, it wasn't like that. It wasn't beautiful at all.

A suitcase with which mice have made free for 27 years. Oh, and a medal. And a sock.

That's shelled quinoa. They ate all my quinoa right off the pantry shelves, because I was too dumb to store it in jars. The mess wasn't all his, by any means.

A papier mache kiwi that Phoebe made in elementary school.

Or maybe high school.  Its legs broke. It's hard to know how to save the kiwi. But Bill saved it, because Phoebe had made it, and I tried to toss it a couple times and couldn't. This time, it took. Bye, sweet kiwi. Wish you weren't 2' across.

From my modest childhood archives, I stumbled across the Game of Birdwatcher. No fooling, I played this board game, rudimentary as it was, all the time. 

I learned all the birds on the flash cards--it wasn't hard--and spun the little arrow on its cardboard card, and moved little plastic pieces around the board. My parents got it for me for Christmas one year. I couldn't believe there was a game for kids like me!

Gazing at it, it hit me how very much things have changed. Would my kids have looked twice at this game at age 8? Nope. They were already plugged in. I had a black and white TV and maybe a handful of shows I could watch after school. No computer. No email. No iPhone. No social media. Not even a Walkman. They weren't invented yet. Just me and some printed cardboard and my dream of someday seeing all these birds, playing a game that debuted the year I was born.

Although the box had disintegrated, I saved the pieces.  Maybe because it's such a powerful illustration of how little I had to work with, and yet I went on to base my life around birds. That made me feel really good. I went directly to the birds for inspiration. I didn't lay around watching videos of them on my phone. I studied them in real life. I still do. 

And the garage filled, and filled. The right bay was all junk. The left bay was useful.

The HO trains...the tracks...sigh. So hard to say goodbye, but I had to. By now, I'd called Habitat for Humanity's ReStore, in Vienna, WV. They agreed to come out on Dec. 4 to pick up anything that was still useful. Well, there was a lot of that. I liked the idea of giving it to them to sell, to benefit Habitat. This is all kitchen and household stuff.

Much of what I hauled up was no good to anyone. That box of cheap trophies. Good Lord, schools around here are into the trophies. Metallized plastic dopey things; heavy but worthless; the kids know they're ridiculous, and yet they still give them out. Wish they'd stick with ribbons. Too many such things in this world. There's Phoebe, winning the spelling bee...You can't keep everything.

Mildewed suitcases. I cleaned up the really nice vintage one and gave the Samsonites the heave ho.

I could no longer get into the junk bay of the garage. I just kept heaving stuff on top.

Yep, that's wine, none of it any good any more.

Yellowtail never was any good.

No use for it, any of it.

That roll of extra linoleum next to the wine box? WHY DID WE SAVE IT?? For years, it served as a ghost trap for white-footed mice. They'd dive in and never get back out. Oh, the mummies. That corner of the basement no longer smells of death, and it never will again. It smells of Ocean Breeze Lysol now, and I smile. 

Behind some pipes on a cold wall, I found the motherlode of hibernating Asian multicolored ladybirds. Dustbusted them up, and dumped them in a bucket of hot water, ever my favorite insecticide. There's a few thousand invasive ladybugs that won't find their way down my neck or into my food this winter. Die and die quickly.

By the time I got to the toy region of the basement, my resolve to throw everything out was beginning to crumble. These toys stood in stark contrast to the boxes of paper and junk. They seemed so much more meaningful and useful than anything else I'd handled here. And by God, they are.

The Doug and Melissa wooden vegetable cutting toy. I couldn't find the knife, but everything else was there. Ohhhh. Saving that. I've got just the harmless little knife that'll work with the Velcro-joined pieces. 

The gorgeous little plastic horses I'd bought over the years for Phoebe. I got lost in their curves, the beauty of their forms. I would have killed for these as a child! I'd have drawn them. I still should! These stay.

A moment of existential angst, written on the underside of a bit of Thomas the Tank Engine track. My heart flopped over like a fish, wondering what had prompted Liam's furtive 

question.  I have an idea. Maybe he remembers. I'll ask him. Update: He knows he wrote it, but “I have no earthly idea why I wrote that.”

I sorted all that track into long, short, and big unwieldy pieces, boxed it up and labeled it. No way was I getting rid of Thomas things. I boxed up all the cars and engines and bridges and cranes, too. Someday there may be babies who'll want to put it together and clobber up their parents' living room floor for years. I could only hope. Just the sound the wooden pieces made, landing in their respective boxes as I sorted, brought back Liam's entire childhood for me. How I loved to watch him, his little blonde head bent in absorption, searching for just the piece of track he needed to complete his particular plan. The wooden track clattered and clopped all day long. 

I packed up that green trestle, remembering. Packed up those myriad cars, remembering. Labeled the boxes, hoping Liam wouldn't have to buy them all over again someday. Thouuuussssannnnds....and worth every cent.

At a little shop in Cumberland, Maryland, Liam found Tank Engine Valhalla. Yes, he came home with some more engines and cars.

This purging--it wasn't all bad. Sorting and storing the toys was sweet. 

A Powerful Trickle

It was November 18 when I went down to the basement with the intention of getting some of the dozen broken office chairs out of there. The basement was a mess, and I thought that might be a good place to start--get big, easily carried things out so I'd have a little room to move. Our basement has been a miasma of junk for decades. The kind of thing I would close off when people came to visit, except that our guest room was downstairs, so everybody wound up seeing it and probably having to decide whether they liked us anyway. As I bent down to pick one up, I noticed a puddle on the floor. You never want to see a puddle on the floor of your basement. Tracing it back, I found that something in the kitchen plumbing had been leaking down into the basement for some time--perhaps as long as a month. I raced upstairs and found a basin my plumber had put under the water inflow tap when he replaced my faucet in late October. It was level full.  One of the new hoses he'd put in was bad. The undersink area was floating and foul. Everything was wet and it had been coming down the wall and onto the shelves on which Bill had stored many, many boxes of miscellaneous papers that described his high school, college and early work life. So many boxes of papers and photos, and most of them were sopping wet. I knew I had to go through every damn one of them.

This is the kind of thing that will spur even the most work-averse person to action: saturated boxes of stuff. Water and mildew wait for no one. Already it smelled funky. That first afternoon, I waded right in, and six hours later I had gotten the wet stuff pulled over toward the door. It was heavy, it was gross, and it was soul-sucking work. I had to save my paintings, which had been sitting in their boxes on the floor in a puddle of water for I don't know how long. I unwrapped them all, dried them off, and reboxed them. The next day I started early and ended after bedtime, and I got most of that wet wall cleared out and the shelves cleaned.

It was daunting. I took a break for a couple of days so I wouldn't lose my soul. Liam came home for Thanksgiving break. Cooking commenced. I loaded the dishwasher for the first time in months. Turned it on. Unbeknownst to me, water shot out of a huge hole in the dishwasher's drain hose, under the sink, out onto the floor, and right back down into the basement. I figured it out when Liam's feet got wet on the other side of the kitchen. This flood was ten times the size of the last one. I could not catch a break from water. Back downstairs I went, mopping, sopping, pulling stuff out of water, saving what I could, combing through things, laying things out to dry that were precious and still salvageable. Tossing. Tossing. Tossing. 

I became a drone to cleaning. It was all I could think about, all I could do. I knew that I would have to remain in this mindset until that basement was done, cleared out and cleaned. The motivation and mindset might not come around again for another 30 years, so I'd better go with it. The right bay of the garage began to fill up with junk. Ritualistically, I'd load the garden cart and haul it up the hill to the garage. Somehow that felt like getting rid of it, felt right. I was staging it for pickup, and I wanted to make pickup as easy as possible for whomever did it.

90 percent of the stuff I had to get rid of was Bill's. The extent to which he'd accumulated and squirrelled away useless crap became shockingly clear. So many boxes of papers, old love letters; none of them to or from me. Stacks of photos, feet high. Old holey T-shirts. Contractor bag after bag of clothing, bird festival shirts, things that hadn't fit him in years. Boxes to every new thing he had ever bought. Might need to return it. Save the box. Files from his work history, from school back to high school. Broken office chairs (eight!) which, rather than put in the dumpster at work, he. brought. home. and. put. in. our. basement. He didn't announce it, he just did it. He couldn't throw anything out. There were six old suitcases, each one of them, surprise! jammed with mildewed worthless clothing.  Everything he didn't want, he piled in that basement, and he never dealt with it again. When he left to go live down the road in September 2017, he took only the things he wanted--his best guitars and music equipment; his favorite clothes and shoes. The rest he left behind, never to look at it again. The rest was left to me.

This is after countless loads were taken out. I don't have photos of the basement as it was when the flooding started. Who would photograph that?

 For 27 years, I'd lived an upstairs/downstairs kind of life, trying not to see the mess in the basement, even as I kept the upstairs as clean and orderly as I could. For most of our married life, I cleaned religiously, once a week. Friends told me that was too much. I didn't see it that way. I had a job to do. As I worked on the downstairs, picking through Bill's endless crap, I came to the epiphany that this house was a perfect mirror of my parents' home. My mother was a clean freak. My dad was a creative slob. Upstairs was hers; downstairs was his.  Upstairs was warm and clean and cozy with cookies and coffee brewing and two rooms with really nice furniture that nobody much sat on, and a family room where everybody did everything, and a kitchen  always humming with industry. And then there was The Basement. There, DOD had four lathes, any number of antique gasoline engines under re-construction; walls hung with tools; boxes of who knows what...there he did his thing. Ida had to go down there to do our laundry; she had to pick her way through that miasma every day, and she couldn't do a damn thing about it, because it was all HIS.  It drove her absolutely nuts. When I was a kid, I used to wonder why she seemed to be mad at him almost all the time. I have come to the realization that it was likely that mess of a basement and all it symbolized that had her doing a slow burn, one I could smell.

We wind up living our parents' lives. I don't know how we do it, but we do.

Way back on June 15, 2018, after Bill had moved out, but before he got sick,  I got a reading from an intuitive named Ellen Bone. One of the things she said that stuck with me was that my house was upset. She told me houses have souls, and can make their feelings known. I listened, trying to imagine this. She said my house was worried that I wouldn't be able to take care of it, and worried that I was going to leave, too (Bill had been out of the house for nine months by then). Well, at that point I had my doubts as to whether I was going to be able to take care of it, too. Suddenly being charged with doing absolutely everything around here was throwing me for a loop. There was a lot of stuff Bill did that I lacked the skills or know-how to do. He'd stop over and do a few things now and then, but he had his hands full fixing up his house now. I was on my own, and this was a lot of house to handle. I was struggling with the concept of having to hire people to help me. I was overwhelmed.

This reading came back to me as I grunted and lifted and dragged crap out of the basement, mopping the wet floors and sorting through every dumb pointless box, looking for things I shouldn't toss. I thought about how not once, but twice in a row, and in completely unrelated incidents, the house took matters into its own hands, sending cascades of water down onto all the junk that was clogging its ch'i. The flooding, I realized, might have been an act of desperation on the part of a house that had simply had enough of chaos and miasma. Or it might have been chance. Bad hoses. Rotten drain tubes. Whatever. It had happened twice, and why it happened was immaterial. All that mattered was how I reacted to it. This house was calling me to arms, and I had no choice but to sign on for whatever was ahead.