Throwaway Rosh Hashanah

This may be the least festive holiday I’ve had in years. But once I went to London, there wasn’t any other way to schedule this, and oh, well, there’s Yom Kippur to look forward to (cough).

I finished the cleaning phase today and loaded up my car and I’m on the road, so far with only one bruise, one papercut and one totally annihilated fingernail.

What I’m hanging on to as this holiday’s gain is the list of things I’ve jettisoned. The corner bedroom is now almost completely empty. The nieces can visit and stay overnight. The middle bedroom is mostly empty (except for the photograph archive). Dad’s seven-year-old computer is backed up onto a new all-in-one, and he has mastered the basic operations of Windows 8.1 to use email, Internet, and word processing. All of the old computer equipment is in a bin for the next counter recycling day along with a lot of other e-waste. The twenty-year-old phone is also replaced and he has a new answering machine message that’s just him. The linen closet is partially sorted and souvenir materials for the quilts the nieces are getting for Christmas are in a box for the quilter. All of mom’s clothes are gone except for one box that’s packed away. Her wedding dress and the dress she made for my brother’s wedding are preserved and stored away. Her fur coat has been passed on to a new owner. All of the kitchen cabinets were emptied and about 2/3 of their contexts have been thrown away or donated. The big freezer is defrosted and almost empty; the small freezer has also been cleaned; all of the old food in the house is gone. The plants dad couldn’t keep up with have been given away and only cactuses are left. The basement is about a third clean but all of the useless paper has been recycled and all of the extra furniture has been donated or given away. The doors are back on the pole barn and another outbuilding is painted.

I tossed about a dozen boxes of my own things (don’t ask me why graded homework from 1981 was still in the corner bedroom; I don’t remember saving it, but I found my brother’s as well). I have about half the clothes I owned in May, having finally discarded the sizes I lost in 2011-13. All the rest of them are clean. My car is only about two thirds as full tonight as it was when I came home. Books I didn’t need have been donated or sold.

I find this excruciating.

One piece of the whole Crucible story I haven’t published yet has to do with my passport. After a frantic search for it in June, I found my expired passport today — in the trunk of my car, in a paper bag with two novels, the passport, and a bunch of dirty clothes. I stuffed it in there in August 2013, when I was traveling from home back to work. I needed to find the passport earlier this year and couldn’t and the fact that I couldn’t created this ridiculous hassle. I never would have looked in that bag, though; I wasn’t touching it because the day that I packed it was such a horrible day and the main thing I associated with the bag was the bad feelings about the fight I had with dad on the day I decamped. The bag’s now unpacked, the clothing washed, the novels donated, the passport tucked away as it’s still an official document for employment purposes and it carries the record of all my foreign residences for a decade.

All these things — the things hold the memories and I’m afraid to resurrect the memories and yet the things continue to accumulate. If I throw them away, I throw away the memories and sometimes I’d like to but first I have to revisit them and so often I would rather not revisit them.

Sometimes this summer when dad and I would fight about giving away this or that thing, I’d find myself saying, you know, we’re not throwing away mom or our memories of mom, we’re just getting rid of this thing that we don’t need and takes up space. Dad would always growl and withdraw — and you know, maybe he’s right. Maybe if you throw away the thing that provokes the memory you weaken the memory.

Some things accumulate memory differently than others. The reason we had that antiquated computer (I swear, the harddrive was probably run by little hamsters who lived inside the tower) was that mom was so attached to it and so reluctant to buy a new machine. But all either of us felt was relief that the machine was replaced and his new one is so much faster and better (and easier on his eyes). But we had a knock-down, dragout over a box of Good Housekeeping magazines that I wanted to toss and he wanted to keep. They don’t seem any more personal — but somehow they are.

I kept telling him — mom is in this house even if we got rid of every single thing she owned.

~ by Servetus on September 26, 2014.