We have been back in Detroit nearly six weeks. Finally, I am settled enough to write. The need to re-organize and empty my house was
a powerful urge during the first weeks of our return. Although our house-sitters did a fantastic
job of caring for our animals, house, and yard, some deep non-rational urge
required I take everything apart, clean, wipe, re-fold, re-stack, re-arrange
and otherwise re-connect to everything we touch or use in the house.
In the kitchen, every shelf, every drawer, whether visible
or no, was emptied, cleaned, and re-ordered.
I have a mania for categorizing, so all the copper pots, cast iron, and
Creuset were cleaned, polished or re-sealed and put in their specific shelf. All of the storage containers were re-united
with their lids and organized by type.
All of the food shelves were scrubbed and organized by food type.
I crawled all over the room, scrubbing the floors and the
woodwork, wiping down doors, cleaning, wiping, touching everything. In the midst of all this, I get rid of
excess. The memorabilia, the little tchotchkes
and doo-hickeys, the piles of paper, the “I might use this someday” stacks of
this and that---all gone through, much of it removed.
This continued throughout the house, especially in the much
neglected basement. I spent days setting
up a new work space and clearing out and organizing a portion of the house that
had become a repository of good intentions, tired memories, and lost
dreams. One distressing day, I pulled
apart the hardware cabinet, to find that our circular saw, sitting in its
cardboard box, had been both wet and occasionally used as a kitty box. It was rusted and filthy; a few of its blades
were so gone to rust they could not be rehabilitated with WD-40 and steel wool.
There, working in my nightgown and bathrobe, I rubbed and
scrubbed the goo and bubbles on this tool, regretting our neglect. I emptied a small wooden cabinet of its
mittens and gloves, then spent hours sorting hinges and sliders and hasps and
whatnot into their own categories and finally into their own marked
drawer. Screws, nuts, bolts,
nails…mixed randomly into jars or piled in their half empty boxes were separated,
organized, and marked.
I repaired or removed chairs and furniture that sat for
years in the basement awaiting attention.
I removed videos, and books, and papers by the box-full. Every piece of clothing in our drawers and
closet were taken out, examined for fit, repair, and cleanliness. Most of my clothes are much too big now. I took sack after sack of clothes to the
Salvation Army until I am in a “pant crisis”—I have only two pair of somewhat
too big pants suitable for work. I have
only three pair of pants for casual wear.
Out go shirts, and shoes, and jackets, and purses. Gone are briefcases. Wes spends days pulling apart bags and bags
carrying the scripts, rehearsal notes, promotional materials, and associated
palaver from years of directing and producing plays. All of the artwork and photos that had been
waiting years for frames have finally been displayed. Yarn and fabric in the box I mailed from
England (in 1983!) are put in project boxes, still awaiting their encounter
with the sewing machine or knitting needles. I pull down a box of dog and cat grooming
supplies, accumulated through years of living with animals. We take leashes, collars, a dog shaving set,
brushes, groomers, on and on, to the Dearborn Animal Rescue group.
 |
| High School Sports |
We pull down books that have sat on the shelves in the
library for years. Out go the stacks of
audio books. All of them good, sometimes
great books. We ask: will we read this
again? If the answer is “No,” out it
goes. Good bye to multiple copies of
anything, detritus of years of teaching.
We debate: shall we keep this set of Carlos Castaneda books, remnant of
our life in the 1970’s. Wes says “Let ‘em
go,” but oddly enough, I say “Keep.” I
want to see if I still find any shred of truth in those trippy old things.
Down on our hands and knees, we clean and scrub and repair
and wax and buff long neglected floors in our library and dressing room. To our embarrassment, we think this may be
the first time we have done the floors in the dressing room, although we have
lived in this house for more than 20 years.
 |
| The floor is finally done! |
We start the long process of going through boxes and boxes
and boxes of papers. The first box is
one gathered by Wes’ mom and returned to us during the traumatic days of
cleaning out the family shed after his father’s funeral. There we found every letter we had written to
them through all the years we had been married.
There were missives from our first years, travelogues of our time living
and biking in Europe, painful letters from our disastrous foray into Houston,
accounts of buying this house, promotional materials from Matrix. Even more remarkable, Wes found letters to
his parents from the young woman who broke his heart. There were long missives from Wes on the road,
hitchhiking his grief away in Europe, escaping from the inevitable but brutal
end of that foray into mismatched love.
 |
| A letter from the road 1982 |
There pages and pages of clippings from Wes’ days of high
school sports, but not a thing from his days of high school theatre. There were
long-lost pictures of children and relatives and olden days of yore. Wes sorts through these artifacts. He wants to throw away all the sports stuff,
but I convince to keep it. In a few
years, it may have more meaning for him than it does now.
On and on the cleaning and sorting and arranging and
disposing goes…right through Christmas…right through New Year’s…right up until
I return to work. It continues a bit at
time, even now. We are making our slow
way through the storage room downstairs and know we have the giant problem of
the unheated but stuffed attic awaiting us when the temperatures finally climb
out of the icebox.
Throughout all this, several questions arise. Why do we have all this stuff? Why did we keep all this stuff? What do we need to carry us forward now? During our 20’s, we were footloose and fancy
free. We moved all the time, shedding
possessions with nary a thought. (Although we now regret some of our
thoughtlessness: we shed a western couch and chair my mother had carried from
the earliest days of her marriage to my long-deceased father.) We were in full explorer mode. Life was out there and we wanted to go meet
it. We’d store the books and papers, garage sale
our meager possessions, and hitch-hike off to our next adventure.
By the time we got to Detroit, in 1989, that pattern was
well past tired. I was 33. I wanted a home. I needed a nest. We set down some roots. For twenty years, we built a home and a
business and a career. We weaved
connections, and mounded up piles, and plugged along. Until it was all much too much.
The bike journey put an end to all that. Across the miles, pedal after pedal, the junk
in our minds, the globs of fat on our guts and butts, were slowly burnt
away. Returning to our home, it was painful
to see how constipated and fussy we had let every part our life become.
So out it all goes.
If it has meaning, or purpose, it gets to stay. Goodbye to all those old and tired patterns,
so long to all that “just in case” keeping.
Good riddance to “woulda, shoulda, mighta” piles of papers, books, and
clothes. The Third Third of our life is
upon us. Leaner, cleaner, clearer…those
are the watch-words for this time of life.
But my-oh-my, do we still have a long way to go! Just as I am still sporting plenty of flubber
jiggling on my gut, butt, and thighs, my house is still crowded with plenty of
stuff. My mind still cavorts in eddies
of worry and piles of fear. There’s a
lot more scrubbing, and cleaning, and clearing to do. It’s all of a piece, both within and without,
to come to the place redounding of peace.
No comments:
Post a Comment