It’s in “a better place”

When I was a child and some person or pet died, I was told “They’ve gone to a better place.” I am getting superstitious about all the items that I had -- when I first moved in -- set in “any old place” and then moved “to a better place” once I got a sense of the cupboards, etc. They have vanished as surely as those passed-over pets. And the most frustrating part is that I can recall in detail my decision to move them, and from where -- but before I get to the image of where I moved them to, it “fades to black” as the directors say. The first location is where I look again and again, as if some part of me is expecting that the item -- the jar of garlic salt, for example -- left footprints to the next spot, or I could catch it returning to visit the cumin. I know that if you go to the kitchen for water or something, then forget what you went for, you return to the spot where you first thought of getting it, in order to jog your memory (or if jogging doesn‘t work, beat it around the head and neck).

I have almost gotten to the desperation point -- sticking a Post-it on the place where I move it from, listing the “forwarding address”! Except that I’ve gotten superstitious about forwarding addresses, too: the credit card companies are now telling me my new address is that of my ex-husband… either he’s still claiming me as a dependent (as if it wasn’t the other way around!) or the fundamentalists have infiltrated and divorce is no longer an option on credit reports. Aside: I wish we could organize those damn companies like the “headline news” companies -- have them feeling embarrassed about having outdated information, rather than proud of it.

But back to the missing items. The problem is compounded because I am struggling to get an entire house in shape at once, and therefore I am pulled in a dozen directions, which makes it simpler to stop looking for something and move on to a more do-able task. But then I forget… and I’ll attempt the task again tomorrow, and go through the entire routine again! I’ve posted a list on my fridge, “AWOL: these items are missing and believed to be organizing in secret: bracket for magnifying lamp; other set of tulip curtains… REWARD for capture!” Possibly the gremlins who inhabit the house after I’m asleep will be motivated to nudge them into view.

And perhaps the most frustrating part is that there seemed to be a cosmic mechanism whereby one of a pair could ask, “Have you seen…?” and the object magically appeared, if only to humiliate the asker. Now living alone, I have no one to ask, and before I spend $400 on a pet, I want to be sure the same cosmic mechanism works with dumb animals… but come to think of it, if it worked on my ex… but I don’t want to get back into cleaning up after something, just as a trade-off for a shortcut to locating things. Perhaps there could be a phone number to call? A kind of 911 for missing objects -- you take the cell phone, start wandering the house and call 611... and as soon as you connect to a person, you’d ask and the object would show up. Might help unemployment by giving jobs to those who have a hard time handling actual questions. Heck, it might make a nice after-school solution for grade-schoolers! Even five-year-olds know how to pick up a phone and say “hello”… and that’s all that would be needed.

Meanwhile, I continue to wander around the new house, staring into cupboards and wondering, “Was the wood polish there, or did I dream it?” and, in my eagerness to find the lost items, moving and misplacing a whole new generation of items! At this rate, I will be lost soon myself. (Hint: check under the pile of boxes in the office alcove -- I probably crawled in to hide).

To Fix or Not to Fix

More disconnected snippets from an overworked brain:

My genius lies with destruction, unfortunately. It is a forgone conclusion that if I investigate why something is slightly askew, it will soon be completely askew, if it is even still recognizable. The backsplash on the kitchen sink is a good example… tear it off, decide I want tiles, realize I don’t have tiles, or even a plan for which I want! And suddenly a longterm decision becomes an emergency one. Fortunately, I managed to get to a tile outlet on my monthly trip back to the city… unfortunately, I can’t measure and am woefully short of tiles. Now I have several jars sitting hard against the backsplash, trying to wedge it in place rather than glue it and then tear it off a week later (which of course is homeowner slang for “next decade”).

Having my own home allows me to have more greenery -- but, sucker that I am, on my first attempt, I adopted two forlorn houseplants from Thriftway. How cruel of them to post a sign: “Help! We want to Live! Take us home!” and offer them at half price… I can never callously allow a plant to die… I am now auntie to an ornamental pepper and some tropical with corrugated leaves -- and my houseplant books are buried at least four boxes deep…

My hands look like I’ve been trying to grate them… but only one wound was the grater - the others were the broken toilet, the large hunks of wood I wrestle into the woodstove, the staples I’m trying to pull from the wood floors… I need tiny knuckle-pads like they have knee pads… I’ve tried using gloves but I’m enough of a klutz without them, and besides, the spears that emerge from these behemoth chunks of wood just laugh at my garden gloves. “Splinters” doesn’t even begin to cover it. These are toothpicks for Godzilla.

Despite my best efforts to slow down and plan rationally, my “I Love Lucy” imitations occur daily, especially in the cleaning department. Can’t tell if I used to be a vaudeville comic in a previous life, or if there’s a short-circuit between brain and limbs. Or possibly the Dual Processor gives out after age fifty. Anyway, a week before the move, after having torn up all the rugs (I’d made an honest effort to vacuum, but when you fill a bag on one 8x10 rug and it’s still dusty… time to rip up!!), I found oak floors that had obviously been lived on pre-rug -- by someone who believed that paint-can circles make a stylish statement on oak. Okay, I decided, I have three days to do something about that before the heavy furniture comes in… I remember about Murphy’s Oil soap, though I’m not sure it’s meant for semi-polished floors (if by “polished“ you mean covered by congealed resinous goop). I decide to try it… first one corner of the office floor, just so I can see what the difference is when dry -- none, though I know I’m removing dirt because the water instantaneously turns the color of slate. I then proceed to a portion of living room floor where the couch will be. I’m preparing the sections of floor in each room that will be covered by furniture, because I haven’t the strength or back-flex to do all of them in three days. I figure the rest of the flooring will be a winter project.

Within two shakes of the mop, I’ve knocked the whole bucket of water across the floor! I barely have time for the signature “Waaah!!”… it’s heading toward the Sunday papers I just bought (quick! Are they water-soppers or news?), and (of course) heading straight for the unfinished wood bathroom cabinet that I’m also trying to assemble on the living room floor -- like a mini tsunami, the water gushes toward disaster -- I shriek, grab up the papers (save the comics!!) and run for the bathroom towels! I only have one of each, bath and hand, and they are dropped down and swabbed around on a floor that resembles a NYC subway station floor! Now, any sensible person would have immediately reclassified them as “rags”, but I - quickly thinking, “I have my work clothes in the wash”, run and drop them in too… (fortunately the work clothes look like rags in any case). Anyway, I’m grabbing stuff out of the way, cursing and mopping… and grateful that the very hot woodstove may quickly dry up the mistake… and if it leaves a stain the size of Lake Erie, it will be one of a dozen on the floor… we’ll find out if Murphy’s oil soap is a preservative…

I finally got the bathroom cabinet up and into the bathroom -- by ignoring two screws that refused to go in, even when I drilled a small hole, and the slight gap between parts caused by a single person’s inability to hold together two large planks of wood. Due to the fact that the room itself is crooked, and especially the toilet is cockeyed from the wall, the little cabinet looks skewed… and it is leaning away from the wall dangerously… but if I bolt it to the wall, can I unbolt it when I want to paint the wall?? For about a day, I had it wedged upright by pieces of cardboard and by the Kleenex box… finally had to decide to bolt it in or risk being crushed as I sat on the toilet -- not the epitaph I want for the headstone!

Short Takes from a Short-Circuited Brain

Because my brain is short-circuiting, due to all the calories going to long-overused muscles, this entry is in the nature of snippets…

I have stepped back in time, in a wonderful way -- the local library is still using the card-punching process; I haven’t seen that since I was a page at the Westfield NJ library in the 70’s! My job was to pre-datestamp the cards to slip into the books: the cards had large numbers 1-4, which if I remember meant the number of weeks they were checked out for… no receipts, no online tallies… I’m going from a system where they send automatic email warning me when the books and DVDs will be due, to a place that I have to look at each individual book! And they don’t even trust me with the card! Apparently they just keep my number, and I give them my name every time I walk up… that’s a small clientele!

I have so far been unable to unscrew the tub drain that has a chip in it, so I finally got desperate and used some of my modelling clay to fill the gap… should hold until I get the contractor in (he came the first week, but since he has other pending clients, it‘s scheduled for after Christmas)… I went ahead and got the exterminators to spray -- if the repair work continues to slip as it has, the toxins will be pretty much soaked in by the time he gets under the house…

I can barely move to type, having just ripped up three wall to wall carpets and their underlayment in the space of about 5 hours… this from a woman who would often have to fold her laundry in shifts because she couldn’t keep her arms up long enough! Not only torn them up, but got two of them into the bed of my truck and over to the dump -- if I wake up tomorrow and find I can’t push myself to a sitting position, I’ll know why. That, and my hands feel like they are so dry they are sucking moisture out of the air…I could probably dry dishes with my bare hands at this point.

I also shovelled out the gutters; apparently the last time was about 1960... if I was counting the tree rings correctly. I’m not sure if it was fertile soil, but there were actually a couple worms up there -- the vermiculture version of Penthouse dining… and that’s got to be gourmet stuff if they devoted a decade or so to climb the gutterpipes… they got impatient with trickle-down theory, too, I guess…I took the toilet brush up onto the roof to brush off the moss -- I’m not saying the moss balls were oversize, but they put up such a defense that it felt like the Attack of the Green Tribbles.

I toasted my first night here with wine -- boxed wine, of course; it’s only fitting.
Now I have to go blow up my bed again so I can keep far enough away from the dust to be able to breathe through the night. A bien tot!

A Moving Saga

(Still neck-deep in boxes: here's the move-day story:)
I know I’d hired professional movers when they called me at 7:25 the day of the move… to ask if they could be, oh, an hour and a half late. Definitely pros. They’d probably had me double-booked for weeks, but knowing I can’t say no when I’ve just packed my last roll of toilet paper and my last spoon, disconnected my phone and internet… I was as much a hostage as the people sitting in row 17 of Northwest Air-Lies… so I sat there, gnawing on cold Mexican leftovers (okay, I saved out one fork-- I‘ve moved before too, you know) and re-reading old computer files… no sense moving them if I can toss them in the trash ahead of time, right? I kept seeing more and more items that I was too afraid for them to move, and putting them into the pile for my truck -- soon I’d be moving everything except the furniture… which is probably a good thing because they also asked if they could bring a smaller truck.

When they did arrive, they worked very hard to cram the smaller truck full of my stuff. No tossing boxes, at least, but there were a few things that were definitely a size smaller when I finally unpacked them… to their credit, I have never seen a truck packed that full -- safety line be damned -- that space had boxes to the roof, and probably a mouse couldn’t have fit between them. And they managed to get the steelcase flatfile into the truck without taking out more than half the drawers, which was more than my friends and I could do. However, despite their best efforts, and despite also piling my truck as high as was safe, they managed to only get 99.5% into the truck… as the got to the back of the garage, the guy’s patter went from, “Oh, sure - no problem! That’s why we’re professionals” to “Oh, I think we can do it” to “Well, we’ll get close, for sure.” The problem is: close doesn’t get all my stuff down to the new house! I pursued the theoretically possibility: and if you can’t get it all? What then? Unfortunately, I’d let slip that I was coming back the next day to clean up the apt. His cheerful solution was that there wasn’t more remaining than could fit in my truck. However, he didn’t offer a .5% discount for only doing a partial job… which is why I didn’t feel much guilt as I led them along ever more rural roads, as the sun dipped closer to the horizon (hey, they said they’d be there at 9am!), and when they got out of the truck at the new place with glazed, exhausted looks on their faces, I was minimally sympathetic… after all, they had to drive back after they’d unloaded it all!

And they did -- stuff poured out of that truck like it had legs. And since I’m sure the boxes weren’t groaning, I assume the guys were throwing their voices. They put the furniture where it needed to be with only minor gouges in the plaster (left unremarked by them) and piled the boxes 5 high in the new garage -- in front of the pump house door, I later realized. By the time they were done, they looked like it would take a gallon of coffee to get them back up the highway, so I tipped them despite the residual packing still facing me. I was grateful it all got there, presumably in one piece, and that I had an off-the-floor bed and towels for that hot bath I’d be taking!

Hot water is one of the first necessities … and it’s amazing how we just assume it’ll be there… as dusk was closing in,I first unloaded my truck (I'd been too busy directing before that) and made sure I knew where all the light switches were, and then decided to try the hot water. Cognizant of the fact that you must get the trapped air from the line before you try the hot water, or you will burn out the heater motor (learned that at the cabin), I first ran the cold til it was smooth, and started on the hot… at first it was the usual spluttering (like Rush contemplating Hilary), but then it sounded more like hissing. Uncertain, I actually consulted the manual -- a good thing: apparently hydrogen gas (very explosive) can form when the heater hasn’t been used in a while (like, say… 2 years??) and it is very important (duh!) to release it safely while not using machinery that can spark… I rushed to shut down the baseboard heaters, turned the faucet on full and backed away… contemplating the fact that I had not yet physically signed the insurance papers. After what seemed like forever, the hissing stopped and the water sounded like… well, water. And smelled like rotten eggs! Back to the manual. Apparently the anodes (Anode? wasn‘t that Luke Skywalker‘s father?) can react with certain kinds of water (Ah, Murphy‘s Law….!) to create this lovely sulfurous odor… and the only solution is to chlorinate and hope for the best. Okay; I’m supposed to add chlorine to sulphur? Isn’t that a Chemistry 101 taboo? Or am I thinking vinegar? And it states that it may still persist and in that case your have to get a chlorine filter… or walk around stinking of rotten eggs. I’ve just gotten to that age when everyone would immediately assume my gut was betraying me… what a great way to meet the new neighbors! Not.

I also have a 1940 era stove -- quite a feat, since this house was supposedly built in the 50’s… I can’t see how the burners are detachable, which means the saucers under them look like the floor of a theater after a Star Trek weekend marathon… and it has a combination clock and timer… which is unfortunately 6 hours off, and there is no way to reset the clock! Proof positive that this stove was built before Daylight savings time! It also ticks like the logo noise from 60 Minutes, which has put me on edge a bit… I am guess that one of these days soon, I will be disassembling that piece, and hoping that it’s not an essential part of the damn stove!

On Your Marks, Get Ready….

(still nuts unpacking; posting this one, written mid November):

On hearing that the septic tank was in the ground and that one small inspection stood between me and putting down tens of thousands on my new house, I understandably, developed a few butterflies. These might have been a new species - each specimen felt like it was a foot wide, fluttering in my gut. Yes, I have been pushing and working very hard to get this to happen, and yet -- do I know what I’m doing?? I am making a huge commitment… it feels a lot like the nerves I got just before my wedding (and considering how that turned out, it should have told me something!) -- can I trust that this will end better?? Me and the house, til bankruptcy or nursing home do us part. I think it’s an excellent sign that the former owner is in a nursing home -- this is a faithful house that does not chase people away… but am I too young for commitment? I barely have gray hair!

Yet here it is, the week before the “I do’s”, and I am starting to label boxes and bags, “First Truckload”, “Second Truckload”, etc. I am trying to conserve the tiny sliver of bath soap so that I don’t have to open a new one before the move, and yet I am buying large extra pounds of stuff that I imagine I won’t be able to get outside the metro area (at least as cheaply), like gluten-free flours (I just bought $63 worth). And of course, not wanting to open any of them because they will be that much harder to move. Conserving and/or stocking up -- I feel like a PushmePullyou! I broke down and bought a few more tools yesterday -- not wanting extra things to move (and lose), but fearing that once I move to the house, or even before, I will need them to fix things and then will have to detour a half hour or more out of my way to buy what I need. This new place is just close enough to drive back and forth a few times, but not nearly close enough to run back if I forget a tool. So I’m watching the gas prices, planning the first immediate tasks and gathering the boxes that match. And there are precious things that I am torn between moving first to be sure they don’t break, and moving last to be sure they are safe (the new place will still be empty for a week or two).

And I think it’s probably much simpler than I’m making it, but I also realize that keeping busy is very effective in distracting from the terror. I believe that’s why weddings are such big deals. If all you and your fiance had to do for the months leading up to the date was stare at each other and say, “Do we really want to do this?” most marriages wouldn’t happen. It’s only because the woman is so distracted by the party favors and gown colors that she doesn’t see how pitifully ineffective and even reticent the male has become. And why is it that my taste in houses runs the same as my taste in men? I keep getting fixer-uppers! But I digress.

I can’t blame the house for the septic issue, and it has withstood the rain that came in with October and shows every intention of staying… so the next step is to tie the knot and then… oh, the list is so long that those butterflies begin to gallop up and down my spine, fluttering in my braincase until I can’t even read the list! Tear out the rugs, clean every surface, cover shelves with shelf paper, take up the plywood that covers the gravel in the garage…come to think of it - a house will stand for all this change a lot better than a husband. I’d hire a service for all of it, but suddenly I have two weeks and one of them is Thanksgiving week! I’m lucky to get the movers… so Plan B has become, “Do whatever the minimum needed so that the strong guys can move the heavy furniture where you want it for the next six months, and then do everything else later.” And I’ll be so exhausted that I suspect that “later” might be after Christmas.

Just Packing It In

(Up to my neck in boxes on the other end -- so I'm posting something written back when I had nothing to do but wait and write)

I’m now up to my neck in boxes, waiting for that final frantic push of packing, when I give up doing anything else in my life until I move. Technically, I’m about two weeks from that, I think, so I have to keep enough items out to live on, and somehow I keep changing focus as to what that consists of. Do I keep the food processor out, or can I live on more simple foods for two weeks? (yes, but since I packed it a month ago, it came out of its box again last night). Do I pack all my reading material and live out of the library? (Yes, except for one unsealed box of “essentials” - my guide books to this current life, a motley crew of spiritual, renovation, and comedy books). Do I pack up the art and look at naked walls for two weeks? What if it stretches out again? So far, the oil paintings are still on the wall, but if the tank gets into the ground Friday, there will be a packing spree this weekend for sure!

Meanwhile, I veer around brown square stacks, stare again at those pieces that utterly defy packing (someday I’ll watch a professional -- just to see how the huge, crook-neck magnifying light contraption could find a wrapped degree of safety), and give up again for the moment. That’s one of the blessings of panic -- all the finer nuances of possibility drop away, and there is only the crisis. In those moments, it is irrelevant if I put great aunt Sarah’s ceramic jug in with the cupcake tins -- eventually it’ll all get there, and I’ll unpack it again… eventually. An irrational segment of brain takes charge during crises; logic, sense and even frugality are tossed with the receipts that you will eventually be wanting desperately, and you plunge ahead any which way to the end. “A certain amount of breakage is to be expected” and other such platitudes act as Teflon coating to the brain as the clock ticks like an unexploded bomb and you grab anything not yet boxed, stuff it into one of several large boxes labelled, “Last Minute Misc. - Open Immediately” that inevitably end up four layers down in the new place and emerge next Spring as either compost or treasure. I have actually, in these situations, been able to reassure myself that any priceless pottery piece that is broken can become some wonderful mosaic collage, in fact even better than the original. I am actually a mover’s joy because I am just so grateful to get it all there without me having to end up in ER, that I don’t particularly care what state it’s in when it arrives. The days of having robust friends move me are long over; in our 50’s, we are connoisseurs of back, neck and joint pain, and a household full of furniture must be left to the next generation. And my ecologically-conscious friends have refrained from having more than one child each (if that), so that generation is in short supply to help their parents’ friends move… unless you contact them at their local moving company and hire them at the going rates.

-- Listening to an old Irish air, ‘Farewell but Whenever”, I am again reminded that my ancestral melancholy is an irresistible, blood-deep attribute. This song has lines such as “let Fate do her worst, there are relics of joy that come in the nighttime of sorrow and care, and bring back the features that joy used to wear” …“you may break, you may shatter the vase if you will, but the scent of the roses will hang round it still.” Good old Irish - we know what it’s like to be crushed underfoot, and our stubborn refusal to concede that we are miserable is only matched by our stubborn refusal to concede that we are happy. It makes for wonderful conversation, and many a confused outsider… but I digress.

Eversprouting: Optimism, Mushrooms, and Spam

Mushrooms: I think it’s a sign of my country madness that I am even excited about the possibility of gleaning mushrooms from the countryside. I’m not particularly fond of mushrooms, but part of that has always been the insane prices in the markets for fungus. Free is always a good price to me, and so I dream about recognizing the tastier varieties, and even try to look up the ones that appear audaciously in my own backyard. (Once, I had one that really looked like a morel grow up through a crack in the basement floor -- but of course, I was too cowardly to eat it!) And the prolific rain combines with the fertile spongy soil, apparently, to create Oregon fungi that in some places stretch out for 144 acres! (That one, a Honey Mushroom, is too big to start with, definitely; I will try something smaller). But most likely I will start my gleaning with items that I easily recognize: fruits and nuts. It will be interesting to see if they are left on the roadsides like in suburbia or if the country folk share the same value I do. And who can get there faster.

Optimism: One thing that comes out in great quantities, like oil slicks -- or mushrooms -- after a heavy rain, is your friends’ optimism. Of course there’s always one who has a ready list of imminent dangers, but in general, my complaints about the intricacies of the real estate process, and the confusions of home ownership in general, is met with a wave of sunny optimism, behind which I sense a backwash of “better you than me!” The original closing date is already a month in the past? “These things happen -- nothing to worry about!”. The new closing date is just before a holiday that shuts down the country - except for shopping -- for four days? “I’m sure it’ll be fine.” I am amazed - flabbergasted (love that word - how does one flabber a gast? or is it gasting a flabber?) by their steely confidence in the face of my concerns. But I guess that’s what friends are for: to sit at their tables, firmly ensconced on their settled kitchen floors, and encourage me with great gusto to set out for parts unknown. Where would I be without them? Probably more to the point, where will I end up with them? At this point, somewhere left of “Hic Sunt Dracones” [Here be dragons]…

Spam: The other thing that comes out in vast numbers before, during and after a move, are the advertisers who target you as someone desperately in need of their services. It’s uncanny -- scary, really -- how they know you have just moved in to town, or are looking to renovate something. Of course, if you’ve used a US Post Office “moving notification form” recently, you might begin to suspect the prime culprit. It literally took me five minutes to find the actual moving form in the incredible welter of offers and “helpful” forms for services now crammed into the “moving packet”… the only kind of packet that thing qualifies as is a Spam Packet. Speaking of which, my spam filter used to be full of Rolex watch offers and Viagra deals (apparently assuming women like to be pro-active?) -- now I’ve got message after message offering me free hardware store shopping sprees or consultations with interior decorators. I’d go to an interior decorator about as fast as I’d take a pet to therapy. These “room whisperers” might have some use in the big cities where you desperately need to know whether you are in your own apartment or the identical box next door, but the house of a writer usually has one décor anyway - piles of papers and books (and books are -- after all -- just a more compact pile of paper). Even with the advent of computers, we produce enough paper printouts to create shredded bedding for an elephant. So interior design consists of stacking those papers in slightly different configurations, mostly to find a chair(or make a chair!)for a guest. And since the majority of guests to a writer’s house are other writers, what they most look at are the bookshelves and the fridge -- generally areas not a focus of your typical interior design wizard. Writers can sometimes proliferate like mushrooms...but I digress.