Let’s Clean the Whole House

There was this chair at Granny’s. I’d never seen a chair like that. The left arm was a normal wooden chair arm, but the right arm swooped out into a flat writing surface.

It was interesting, but I didn’t need a chair, and there was nowhere in my house to put it, and besides, I didn’t have much money.

It took me a couple of weeks to give in and buy it. I drove it home, shaking my head at my own irrational behavior.

I put it in my music room – office, after kicking aside some of the clutter. I knew something was going to have to give. There was a pile in that room. That pile has had me stuck for at least fifteen years.

It was all the family photos. Rick was an only child, so I have all the photos from his family, and his mother’s family and his father’s family. I also have pictures of our kids and my grandson growing up, and pictures from my childhood and my mother’s family, and my father’s family. Pictures of the aunts and uncles and cousins, and some who died young, because people did die young, of disease and accident.

 So, one hundred and twenty or thirty years of photographs, six families. People. Stories. People whose names I don’t know, much less their stories.

I have never been able to sort these photographs. Oh, I’d start putting them into piles, by date and family, but I’d give up after a few days. It was too much.

But now something had turned a corner inside of me. Suddenly it was time to clear out the pile, and time to get into Rick’s corner in the bedroom, which I have not been able to touch since he died.

I dug in. Started moving stuff out of Rick’s corner.  Mind you, tidying up Rick’s corner is not a rational action. There was his drawing board, and the space heater he kept under the drawing board, so he was toasty warm when he worked. There were sketchbooks and drawings, and tons of pencils and drawing pens, and along with Rick’s drawings that I knew well, I found things I’d never seen. Little notes he’d scribbled on the backs of envelopes, or on odd scraps of paper.

It took most of the week, but I got the corner a little more organized and I got the pile of photos moved out of the music room – office. The chair I did not need now sits where the pile was, and the floor is clear for the first time in years.

Bags of stuff went to recycling. Bags of stuff went to Granny’s. Bags of stuff went into the garbage cans to await being taken to the transfer station.

There is much more to do. It was tiring work, but so worth it, and I really loved finding those little Easter eggs from Rick.

Meanwhile, back out in the world, there were bad things happening. A journalist was brutally murdered, for speaking truth to power. Most of us understood what had happened and why, even if we didn’t know the gruesome details, but the powers that be lied about what happened, and dissimulated. They said, “We don’t know if he’s dead; he left by the back door; we’re investigating; oh, he’s dead but it was an accident, an interrogation got out of hand;” and finally, “Why are you so outraged? You want to shut up your critical journalists.”

Meanwhile we have heard that a caravan of thousands of refugees from Honduras is marching north through Guatemala into Mexico, heading for the United States. Things must be terrible in Honduras if people would walk over a thousand miles to arrive at our border, where they will most likely be arrested and deported, and lose their children in the bargain.

Conservatives I know are angry and afraid because of this caravan. The thought of immigrants coming here threatens them. “They are coming here to get FREE things,” one friend said.

Yes. It is so cheap to live in this country. The free health care, the free education, the free housing for the homeless … oops, I dozed off there for a minute.

America is not cheap, but America is our home and it is in trouble. I can still write smart aleck essays and not get my head chopped off. It’s a home, a country, worth fighting for. Let’s clean house.

VOTE: Get your ballot in before the mail goes out on November 6, or into the ballot drop box at the Vashon library before the box is closed at 8 p.m. that night.

We’ll see how the election goes, and then we’ll have a clearer idea of where we go from here.