I remember talking about purses with her, while we were shopping. They needed compartments, she said. They should have zippers.
What is to be done with this black bag?
When I steeled myself to tackle the filth and clutter in Mom’s house, I moved into the work while sternly ordering myself to stop wasting energy blaming my sister, her husband and daughter for living in it for decades, heaping it into a kind of baroque installation, a living artwork about sloth. They had gone out of their way to bring in more and more cats, from four to eight cats at a time and sometimes unhealthy, which worsened the mess.
Cats I love, but they are machines that generate urine and feces. To own a cat is to own responsibility for its detritus. And they do amuse themselves by dashing anything that can move off any high place they can reach, poking that thing to the floor. And then they must bat it under shelving units, they must. You must know this and accept the chores that come with it. You cannot throw up your hands and say, “They did that,” without bending down to get the thing back up off the floor.
Every place my sister lives winds up looking the way Mom’s house looks — hallways blocked by broken devices and abandoned projects, forgotten enthusiasms, a forest of furniture, trashed books, multiplicities of plastic bottles and toilet paper tubes that no one may remove because they are “recycling,” shredders, broken shredders, advertisements for shredders ...
Clotted around the stuff like so much peanut butter in hair will be cat litter — in this case it was wood chip mulch — layered with envelopes, bills, tax returns, silverfish, unspooling thread, clothes, clothes, clothes ... Always, there are books about clearing away clutter.
But then came experiences I wasn’t prepared for:
I hold this worthless thing and I am a little girl, playing alone for hours with the contents of a mid-century modern secretary/shelving unit, loving the quiet snick of magnets as the doors open or close. I like the glowing grain of the wood; I like the aroma of furniture wax. I spend hours reorganizing the contents of cubbies: a ship in a bottle; a fat straw lion, from Africa, maybe; stacks of wooden picnic plates.
Especially I like some little boxes that live inside the cabinet and never come out to be used. These are papery cardboard boxes, not bigger than 4 or 5 inches each and each containing its own “hurricane lantern” — a two-part assembly with a metal base of unusual color and a glass bell shaped like a tulip. The colors differ from box to box; and I do not know what a hurricane is.
When I steeled myself to tackle the filth and clutter in Mom’s house, I moved into the work while sternly ordering myself to stop wasting energy blaming my sister, her husband and daughter for living in it for decades, heaping it into a kind of baroque installation, a living artwork about sloth. They had gone out of their way to bring in more and more cats, from four to eight cats at a time and sometimes unhealthy, which worsened the mess. 
Cats I love, but they are machines that generate urine and feces. To own a cat is to own responsibility for its detritus. And they do amuse themselves by dashing anything that can move off any high place they can reach, poking that thing to the floor. And then they must bat it under shelving units, they must. You must know this and accept the chores that come with it. You cannot throw up your hands and say, “They did that,” without bending down to get the thing back up off the floor.
Every place my sister lives winds up looking the way Mom’s house looks — hallways blocked by broken devices and abandoned projects, forgotten enthusiasms, a forest of furniture, trashed books, multiplicities of plastic bottles and toilet paper tubes that no one may remove because they are “recycling,” shredders, broken shredders, advertisements for shredders ...
Clotted around the stuff like so much peanut butter in hair will be cat litter — in this case it was wood chip mulch — layered with envelopes, bills, tax returns, silverfish, unspooling thread, clothes, clothes, clothes ... Always, there are books about clearing away clutter.
An open doorway — she took doors off hinges — is like a window into a thicket of metal and wooden chair legs.
The floors in every room are coated in a thick layer of silt and hair stuck to islands of dried syrup.
In the upstairs bathroom between the toilet and the wall I used a garden hoe to un-fuse a rotten facecloth from a kind of molasses of filth hardened around it. It peeled away dangerously but came off all in a piece, a black lace, a widow’s net for her funeral hat.
So it had been there a while. And so had the diapers in the garbage bag hanging off the doorknob by yellow drawstrings.
The silt bothered me because it testified that no one swept up anything, ever. Two vacuum cleaners, three brooms, and no one swept anything, ever.
And yet all of that was OK and I could let go my self-righteous repugnance and stop wasting time on blame. Let it go: That sort of thought is rooted in fear anyway, fear that the task is too much, that we will fail. Anything made by people will be finite, I told myself. Nothing lasts forever, not even mess.
But then came experiences I wasn’t prepared for:
Item by item, I would find an old friend, a thing remembered from my childhood. These things had a magical quality once: new, cunning, special.
But the thing in my hand is not that. It is tatty, gross, broken — worthless.
 |
| Dad brought this back from Greece. Although it can be stacked so it looks whole, it is trash now. I could repair it, but there are chips missing inside, and anyway, |
Especially I like some little boxes that live inside the cabinet and never come out to be used. These are papery cardboard boxes, not bigger than 4 or 5 inches each and each containing its own “hurricane lantern” — a two-part assembly with a metal base of unusual color and a glass bell shaped like a tulip. The colors differ from box to box; and I do not know what a hurricane is.
The hurricane lanterns turned out to be like the tunafish that came in a can. I remember in both cases the days I learned that tuna was a fish! and a hurricane was a storm! But fish have nothing to do with cans, how could that be? And the little hurricane lanterns made even less sense, because they were so light a cat might dash them off a table. What use would they be in a storm?
They remind me of my home, clean and yet constantly being cleaned by children marshaled into work details by parents who must have been paragons of energy.
But now I am the adult making executive decisions, one after another, and these once magical things are dented, chipped, frayed, threadbare, sticky, broken: worth less than less.
Junk.
One of my college English teachers, Eileen Gregory, told me that we should thank god for disillusion. People destroy themselves over illusions.
But what will happen to the wonder that was the world after I throw its ruins away?
I hold my mama’s black purse.
I am Hamlet holding Yorick’s skull.
I shove it in the garbage bag with the rotten death lace. I pull the yellow drawstrings together. I move on.
