Musings

This photo was taken in about the 1950s.

For about the past 2-1/2 weeks, my family and my sister's family have been cleaning and fixing and dejunking my mother's house, preparing for the Tucson Young Women to visit and facing head-on the up-to-now mostly (although not entirely) delayed but unavoidable task of sorting my mother's possessions.

This is not to say we're emptying the house because that is not our current objective but like I said: cleaning, fixing and dejunking in preparation for the Tucson Young Women, with our emphasis on dejunking the place, aka throwing out trash. We need to ferret out any treasures from that trash.

We have filled two dumpsters so far. We have taken perhaps 1/2 a dumpster's worth of stuff to D.I. recently. And, reaching back a few years, we've cumulatively thrown out about one dumpster of stuff via city trash cans (one can at a time).

If we were to gauge how many dumpsters we have yet to fill based on what has gone before, and only being able to guess at what is lurking in one particular closet, Dad's office and the small attic, not to mention other smaller hot spots around the house, I'd say we have at least three full dumpsters to go.

We have found the most time-consuming kind of "junk" to go through is the paper--junk mail, regular mail (particularly Christmas cards), bits of this and that, clothes pins, newspaper clippings, unused cough drops, used napkins and paper towels, church programs, and all thrown together with important papers and old family photos. We have to look through these "piles" one piece at a time because of how it is thrown together.

Aunt M's room took two adult women (my sister and me) working at hyper-speed about 2-1/2 days to work through that room, and it wasn't visually overloaded like the front closet, the office and the attic but it contained a lot of paper stuff. If we don't mine into paper stuff, the clean out can go fairly rapidly. However, I expect we will find much of that paper stuff in Dad's office, once we excavate down to that archival layer and some of that archival layer dates back to my grandpa's era. Heaven help us.

For about the last twelve years of Mom living at her home, she didn't and then couldn't sort through her stuff and it is all there waiting for us. Well, as of today, what's waiting for us is minus two and one-half dumpsters full of the stuff.

I'm hoping that as we leave the archival layer of the 2000s and the 1990s, that we will find that Mom was able to have already done some of that sifting herself for the time frame of the 1960s through the 1980s. We will soon find out when we tackle those three big areas I just mentioned.

We have also mined into lots of memories as we've done our excavation. We had great parents and a great home life. My sister and I have reminisced, laughed and shed tears together.

Because of the almost thorough immersion I have had in Mom's house with all the time I have spent there lately, I almost feel like I am in several eras simultaneously--the Now and the Then--and I do not feel tethered in either, really.

It has almost seemed at times that Mom was merely away, running an errand or two, while my sister and I helped her prepare her house for company. However, even as this illusion would shimmer before us, the reality would come to us forcefully again and again (particularly when visiting her) that she would not be home at all.

It has seemed very much of two minds or of two cross purposes to work to put the house together, all the while taking it apart--to fix the house as though someone lived there, all the while taking it apart because the person who lived there can no longer come back to animate her home and possessions.

Our task has been very sobering and poignant. But it has been good and worthwhile--something that has to be done. I do not want to spread this experience over a series of years, at least as far as the dejunking goes. If I lose my momentum, I am not sure I could bring myself to go again. So I keep going. We need to finish what we have started.