It was a hot, muggy summer afternoon, and beads of perspiration ran down the sides of my face and dripped off my chin and down my chest. A good time to sit in the shade, sip a glass of lemonade over ice, and watch the goldfinches alight at the thistle feeders.
Instead, I was dismantling pieces of my past on a beastly hot day in an effort to make more sense and order of my present. In other words, I was cleaning out the garage.
A project like this is almost never my idea, and that was certainly true here. But the man in my life has held sway on such epic undertakings for several years now. Once we'd finished the patio--okay, that one was my idea after twenty years of yearning for a patch of evening shade next to the house--reorganizing the garage was next. It was an offer I couldn't refuse. How often do you get help that's both eager and willing on such an awful task?
Plan "A" had been to rent a dumpster for a couple of days and spend a weekend joyfully pitching all extraneous clutter that had built up for a quarter century. Most of it not traceable to me. It had started out as a three car garage. At the moment it barely had room for two. Upon learning that a dumpster rental would cost me $350, however, I recalibrated and went to Plan "B". That considered that my own trash pickup service would work just fine if I made the effort to diligently recycle everything in sight.
We knew that this stage of things would require a more delicate hand and a finer sense of traige, so for the first two days of creating order from chaos, the field was mine. I knew I would inevitably be going back in time. I just didn't know how far.
The first order of business: I put an ad on Craigslist for the log-splitter with the hydraulics that were shot. I got thirty replies in 24 hours. It was gone in sixty seconds. So far, so good.
The first few hours of "pitch and toss" were like opening miscellenous door prizes. What on earth would I find? Two unopened Kleenex boxes dating from 1997. A cassette tape featuring Tchaikovsky's "Swan Lake." Post-It page markers and a copy of a 2001 issue of Smithsonian Magazine. (Nowhere near my personal record of the 1987 copy I found when cleaning out the bedroom closets, but worth putting in the bathroom reading rack nonetheless.) Two itty-bitty pocket knives with itty-bitty scissors, and a pretty good magnifying glass. A "Magic 8-Ball" pen that still wrote.
I tried to look at the place like a newcomer--asking myself, "what doesn't belong here?" The child-size fainting couch with velvet upholstery missing two of its four legs, for one thing. The styrofoam tombstones that get put on display in the yard about every third Halloween. Where to put them? The extra basement, already cluttered nearly to the brim from emergency cleanings. I took one rusting children's bike to the end of the driveway and propped it against the trash can in hopes that the local "garbage fairy" might take it off my hands. By morning it was gone. I walked a second bike down to the end of the drive. It disappeared too.Inevitably, though, as I worked my way toward the far walls, the discoveries became less trivially amusing and more personal. In a collection of assorted papers, I found a watercolor of a bird I had painted in high school, illustrating some words in French I no longer remembered how to read.
I picked up a polyethylene grocery bag that had a lumpy profile and turned it upside down. A jumble of empty, clean plastic peanut butter jars and lids cascaded into the red garden cart. That one made me scratch my head for a minute ... until I noticed that the lids all had tiny holes drilled into them. Butterfly cages! Though not exactly.
But evidence that I'd spent years looking through fields of milkweed plants in summer after summer with the children when they were small, turning over hundreds of leaves to find Monarch butterfly eggs shaped like tiny pearls or nearly microscopic striped caterpillars munching away on fresh greenery. We brought them home and installed them in the jars, feeding them an ever-fresh supply of milkweed leaves, watching as each tiny caterpillar doubled and doubled and doubled in size until it was roughly the size of a little finger, then spun silk and hung itself upside down from the lid, transforming into a shiny green chrysalis with a row of tiny gold spots. Then waiting, and watching, and waiting, and watching, until one day the green chrysalis started to darken and turn black before, voilà, a butterfly emerged, wings cramped and crumpled like tissue paper, body huge and filled with fluid that would slowly pump into the wings until they were taut like kites over a frame. We set them free on the flowers in the garden and nearby trees, giggling at the scratchy feel of tiny butterfly feet clinging to our fingers as we searched for a good "takeoff" point.
Behind sets of rusting golf clubs lay a collection of plastic beach toys. They were covered with dust and spider webs, but sand from long ago still clunging to their crevices. I smiled and remembered blissful days of summer picnics on a blanket by Lake Michigan, a cooler full of bologna and turkey sandwiches, Doritos, Capri Sun juice bags with their colorful foil wrappers and tiny strawsm, Chips Ahoy cookies, seagulls hovering comically for scraps. No recycling bin for these. The beach toys were set aside for a good scrubbing with soap and water. I have hopes that some day I'll take grandchildren to the shore with a picnic lunch and an agenda of moated castles to build.
After disposing of the cumbersome and long-unused "grass bagging assembly" for the lawn tractor (Craigslist again, halleluiah!!), I finally reached the long neglected section that held my riding gear from when my horses and kids were both still young. My first saddle, bought when I was only eighteen, sat on a metal tree, miraculously intact. I pulled out a long-handled black horse whip with a longer braided tail--called a "lunging whip"--and it suddenly took me back to the age of twenty when I was training my first horse. Many sunkissed evenings pleasantly went by as my young buckskin gelding walked and trotted in thirty-foot circles around me at the end of a long line, guided by voice commands and the occasional tiny crack of the whip whistling in the air behind his haunches. Those days, and at that age, the world was still new and anything was possible.I used to be pretty good with that whip, I remembered, able to clip the heads off daisys with precision. I stepped into the yard and took aim at a nearby dandelion. It had nothing to fear from me. A few more flicks of my wrist, and the dandelion was still standing, laughing at me. I gently stood the whip against the garage wall next to the saddle. Some things I would never part with, the memories they held were so rich.
But when it came to the bridles, this was another story. The bits and buckles had gone rusty, and the leather grown mildewed and stiff and dirty with cobwebs. And so there I stood, conscienciously dissassembling them so that the metal components could get recycled and some shred of usefulness in the cosmos remain. I felt a sense of my own history passing, and tried not to get impatient at how long the task was taking in the ferocious heat. Two bridles into the project, I took another direction.
Beside the saddle, a long flat cardboard box was resting across two saddle trees. It was addressed to my older son ... and it was empty. It took me a minute to conjure the meaning, but this took me back to another beach and another vacation. For several years we had taken the kids to St. Simons Island on the southern Georgia coast. During our last vacation, we had bought several "wake boards" for some beach fun.
A couple were made out of styrofoam, and it was no great loss to leave them behind. But my son had acquired one made of plywood, with a marvelous shark design, and didn't want to leave it behind. Besides, he was the only one in the family who could balance on a wakeboard instead of landing flat on their backside in the water. It was too big for carry-on luggage, so what were we to do?
Necessity being the mother of invention, we improvised as we drove to the airport. We found a K-Mart or something like it, and I ran inside to buy strapping tape, a magic marker and a cutting tool. Then we drove to the back of the store and scavenged for scrap card board. The package we assembled was more tape than cardboard ... but it did the trick, and the airline accepted it as checked luggage. Those were simpler, more innocent times in so many ways, not just for us but for the world. When you could walk on to a plane with a box cutter in your purse and nobody thought twice about it.As I worked my way deeper into the corners, the excavation took on an air of real mystery. In a secret compartment of a forgotten workbench, I found what appeared to be the legendary long-lost "mouse graveyard." I whisked the tiny skeletons up with my newly purchased shop vac, but not before saving one as a souvenir...just for the day. Finally, there was just one opened bag sitting in a corner, large, silver, with contents that couldn't be determined by nudging from the outside. I opened it a crack, and the unmistakable awful scent of generations of mice and their leavings wafted up. Phew. Was this was Howard Carter was thinking when he first opened King Tut's tomb?
I heaved the bag, still closed, into the wheelbarrow, and took it outside where fresh air would make the sorting task less intolerable. I took a small peek inside again. In the musty gloom I made out the spine of a book that dated back to my teenage years on the farm. Oh my god. What a fitting denouement. This last bag was a portal to the years before my ex and I build this house or garage, a cache of relics I had grabbed from the farmhouse before my parents sold the place.
I pushed the wheelbarrow into a patch of shade, and pulled up a comfortable lawn chair. A treasure trove awaited me among the mouse doots. A four-album set of Benny Goodman records ... playable at 78 r.p.m. Homework from my sixth grade class at Maternity B.V.M. Catholic school in Chicago. I had never kept a diary or a journal when I was a young girl, but in looking over a program from a high school concert, I learned just what day I was on stage playing a Beethoven sonata at Immaculata High School near Chicago's lake shore. There were more watercolors, again, and high school group science reports, and a rusting egg separator. The mice, I noticed, had demonstrated discriminating taste when it came to books. They had cheerfully gnawed and burrowed their way far into a collection of plays by William Shakespeare ... but had left the tales of Edgar Allen Poe largely untouched. "Classics Illustrated" versions of Black Beauty and Robinson Crusoe were likewise well appreciated, along with a serious leather-bound tome of the world's greatest paintings. A book of fairy tales, on the other hand, didn't hold their interest. To my eternal gratitude, they left my Nancy Drew mysteries unmolested.
The last bag finally emptied, I returned to the garage to assist in the homestretch efforts of sweeping and cleaning together, building a new fireplace rack, and loading the pickup truck with items that were so large ... or hazardous ... that they drew a separate trip to a waste disposal site. By the time night fell and the garage was transformed, I was so tired I could hardly walk.
I'm all cleaned off now, the heat and the sweat and the exhaustion of the weekend starting to fade in memory. But I look forward to a time sometime soon, when I'll sit on that new patio with a glass of lemonade in the evening shade, watch the goldfinches and hummingbirds alight on their feeders, and take another, more leisurely walk back in time with Nancy Drew and "The Secret of the Old Clock."
