Caregiving Journal 28-Aftermath II

I am sitting in my car, two windows and the strangely named moon roof open.  The breeze is blowing lightly through the car, dark clouds are glowering over the water and I can hear the happy laughs and voices of people who are neighbors to this park at Kitsap Lake.

I am in the “upper level” of the park, an area that appeared in the last couple of years.  It must have been donated; it wasn’t a part of the park when I used to come here to eat my lunch back in my working days.  I can see the lake but not be bothered by the guys backing their boat-hitched trucks down the ramp to launch.

Today I’m here taking a lunch break from my current job—the job of cleaning out Mom’s house.  I started doing this work in earnest about a week before Mom’s memorial service, just about a month ago, though it seems like longer.

A lot has gotten done—St. Vincent de Paul has hauled away half a garage full of furniture, clothing, books and now we have another half a garage ready for pick-up.  We have an 8 yard and a 6 yard dumpster, already emptied once, filling up again.

I was astounded by the number of scarves Mom had, but even more surprised by all the wine bottles Dad kept.  My husband and son-in-law found a cache in the basement a week ago and I found many more boxes of bottles, many of them jug sized, yesterday.  Apparently, Dad was making wine and who knows what else.  I found three bottles with clear alcohol of some kind in them and several bottles of wine that had turned reddish brown.  All went down the laundry room sink—the basement was redolent with alcohol smells for hours, mingling uncomfortably with the odor of mildew.

Upstairs in the living room I’ve managed to get all the books in boxes, helped my husband move the broken grandfather clock out to the garage and the vacuum cleaner chest, carefully upholstered in light-green vinyl, too.  The chest contained a vintage Electrolux vacuum that still started.  Dad, who took an upholstery course at Olympic College in his twenties, upholstered the chest.  He had given away most of his important tools when his hands wouldn’t cooperate with him anymore, but there remained many end bolts of fabric in the basement, not to mention scores of long tubes that used to hold fabric and hundreds of brads and tacks.

The entire 2 ½ weeks my daughter was helping me clean, she was searching for the key to open Mom’s cedar chest.  She didn’t find it so my husband jimmied it open yesterday.  All along I’d suggested it would probably be like Geraldo Rivera’s hope and excitement about  opening Al Capone’s vault.  We’d open the chest and there wouldn’t be anything there.  To the contrary, among some other not very important pieces of clothing was my mother’s wedding dress and beside it another fragile dress, one of my grandmother’s dresses from the time of the First World War.  Both dresses are the color of white roses starting to fade.  They are gossamer light, with almost no weight.

My husband asked me if I found any treasures in the cedar chest.  I told him about the dresses and his response was typical of a man who is unsentimental and who views antiques as just old junk.  He said, “Why would anyone want to keep those?”  I don’t really know what I will do with them, but I won’t give them to anyone who won’t appreciate their history.  I imagine my tiny mother, her dark hair spilling over the shoulders of her lovely wedding dress, nervous and excited on her wedding day, her mother and sisters assisting with the covered buttons down the back of her beautiful dress.  The dress itself never appeared in a photograph because her father forgot to follow through on his only task for the wedding—hiring the photographer.  My mother told me that sad story many times, with resignation.  Wedding portraits were taken later, but there is no photographic history of that day in April of 1942.

The basement contains a horrible amount of junk collected by my parents who experienced the Great Depression and must have felt that saving everything, even if it was broken, would somehow be a hedge against hard times coming again.  But there is also a full-sized pool table, cues, and balls, even chalk from the days when we used to go down after Thanksgiving dinner and play a game or two.  Dad loved pool, as did my brother, Dan, and I liked trying to hit the balls and loved the sound of the balls clicking and falling with a satisfying thud into the pocket, the squeak of the chalk against the tip of the cue, the kidding and joking of the men.  There was just enough room around the table so that your cue stick didn’t hit the wall behind you.  My younger daughter, who lives in San Diego, wants the pool table and I hope she can figure out a way to get it to her fiance’s home in Eugene.  She has good memories of the games, too.

At the urging and gentle encouragement of my older daughter, my brother is wrapping his Harley Davidson models, “Burrito Style” he says.  This is the one and only worry he has about moving. All the models he had when the house caught on fire in 2002 were ruined by the packers who put all of his and Mom’s belongings in storage.

The last frontier in this big challenge will be the third floor of the house, my brother’s bastion.  He has lived upstairs, unhampered by intruders or anyone who wanted to clean or to have him clean, since 2002 when his rooms were rebuilt after the fire.  That’s 9 years of accumulation by a person who uses the floor as a closet and who also doesn’t throw anything away.  Mom didn’t venture up those stairs and so she didn’t know how bad it was getting.  I haven’t been up there yet, but like explorers to a primitive Amazonian village, my daughter and son-in-law reported back that it was “frightening”.  I guess I’d better locate my pith helmet.