Gone

   The sale of Mom’s house has closed; the check is in the bank; all I still need to do about her house is to get through to three utilities’ customer service departments to close her accounts and to her insurer to end her home policy.  
   It might not be a snap. I have a doc appointment first thing Monday and then will have to rush-hour it to work where we are slammed trying to cover a former co-worker’s load, and each of those calls might entail an hour on the phone. When I tried to switch my own Entergy account from Michael’s to my name, I gave up after being on hold for an hour and ten minutes. But surely I can do one call a day over the week?

   She also has some land near Vilonia to sell, but a real estate agent can handle that.

   The land is dirty and crammed with trees, insects and animals, but that’s not a problem for land. Land can have all the silverfish it wants to have and nobody will be disgusted. I don’t need to de-hoardify it, de-clutter it, repair it, repaint it, test it for asbestos, protect it from break-ins by humans and termites, mow it, talk to contractors about it, crawl around underneath it, drive nearly an hour each way to tend it while fretting all the way about its structural defects or weeping.
   The best thing about the land — all 7.1 acres of it: There are no memories attached to it that I must violate to make it sell. 

   Dad bought it because he wanted to be an organic farmer. I have one memory of hiking through tickish-looking dry grasses to a house trailer where I had to drink sweet tea a sunburned woman had to offer me while Dad chatted with her husband about turnip greens and irrigation.
   She wore a handkerchief.
   This is not a memory that will die in slow motion if the realtor tells me the land isn’t worth anything like the amount its assessment might suggest.

   I remember 30 years ago, sometime after my father-in-law died, how Norma divested herself of a huge house full of family debris and treasures, moved into a condo and furnished it with new things that none of her kids were attached to. Michael judged her for the new decor. She kept only a few of her old things, and they were deeply important or just really nice.
   That woman loved to shop. She and her best friend were garage sale fiends. I thought they were materialistic. I failed to note that the stuff she brought home was always a gift for somebody else.
   Today — after five years of being in charge of the stinking heap of bug-infested beloved crap Dad, children and grandkids left in Mom’s house — I’m in awe of Norma.
   Way to go, Norma.

   To declutter your life so that your children don’t have to after you’re gone is generosity. Humility.

   Emptying a two-story house, sorting and discarding a lifetime of family members’ possessions, brutalizes one’s sense of self-importance and taste. How naive I was. But then came the day an estate sale presenter told me the exotic, ingenious, precious stuff I was reluctantly agreeing to ask her to sell on the cheap would not sell because it was broken, chipped, shabby, too big and not worth rehabbing. 
   And I said, OK, donate it. 
   And she said, They won’t take it. 
   And I said OK to the landfill.

   Again and again over the past year, I said OK to the landfill. 

   I personally crushed all kinds of familiar items from my childhood and my siblings’ childhoods into the big trash can and the two little recycling cans and dragged them out to the curb. Week after week. 
   I personally said, “OK, landfill” to the clean-out crew I finally hired because after a year of my effort and a weekend of group effort with the nieces and nephew and two amazing weeks of progress made by my friend the archivist, the house was still so crammed with stuff that potential buyers could not see it.

   Gone to the landfill. I imagine a geometry roughly the shape of the house but made of black bags. I see it inside the great Mount Trashmore of North Little Rock that did not exist when I was in high school.

  So many tormented nights: Why not have a series of yard sales? Why not stack the things in the yard and sit out in that tatty yard, with the mosquitos, weekend after weekend after weekend after the week of hustling from my first job to my second job, unless it rained, unless it was cold, and wait for bargain hunters to come pick through the stuff and haggle me for it, bit by bit? Why not buy a WiFi hotspot device and take credit cards? Could I not have done that? Was I so lazy or selfish I wasn’t willing to put another year into ensuring no more of my family treasure would add to the waste inside Mount Trashmore?

   Sometimes I flash on a framed print that used to hang in my bedroom or the line of Crayola cups and jam jars in the kitchen cabinet. They are in the midden of Mount Trashmore. Do I really have to think about that? 
   What happened to all those books, the rooms full of silverfish-infested religion and outdated textbooks that the estate sale woman found so appalling? I took boxes and boxes of books to the library, but what happened to all the rest of them? What did the clean-out crew do with Mom’s gardening books?

   Things are not people. Sending a broken dish to the landfill is not like pushing long trays stacked with murdered Jews through the door of a furnace. It’s not. 
   It’s not. And yet it feels so brutal.
   It forces me to reassess myself — the size of my life, my collection of thangs.

   And it makes me need to get the clutter out of my own house before I die, so Ben won’t have to feel like this.