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My parents both passed away within 6 months of each other, most recently my father on May 2, 2012. It wasn’t tragic because they were both in their 90s and they were together 68 years, but it was emotionally exhausting to lose them both in such a short period of time. In fact, if you’ve read any of my previous blogs, you know my father’s funeral was on my parent’s 69th wedding anniversary.

For the past 3 1/2 months, my daughter and I have been cleaning out the house. 94 years worth of stuff, and for me, 62 years worth of memories. None of the furniture sold at the estate sale. Very few of the 500 or so books sold, several classical CDs were left as well as a house full of furniture. My daughter managed to sell most of the furniture except my father’s recliner, the guest bed, my father's desk and the filing cabinets in the basement.

What was left was the large desk, all the books, the guest room bed, a wooden cabinet with a copier/printer on it, various small tables, a bunch of small radios and electronic devices, a couple of small televisions, a broken computer, a desk where my dad housed his HAM radios (my son took the radios on his last visit) an old trunk, about 100 records, including a Beethoven Centennial collection, a couple of floor lamps and various other odds and ends - garment bags, jig saw puzzles, a few paintings, and some glass items like casserole dishes, a coffee maker, pickle dishes, wine glasses, some kitchen knives, 2 slide projectors with screen, ironing board, a vintage (but not antique) all-metal Singer sewing machine in its own cabinet, carpet pieces, metal snack trays, a rusty storage cabinet for laundry supplies, several boxes of magazines and a few other odds and ends.

Fortunately, my daughter wanted the desk, one of the lamps and two end tables my dad made in the 50s and a coffee table my father-in-law made around the same time, and the guest bed. They are now housed in my den until she moves.

One other item I couldn’t sell was a really nice Baldwin Acrosonic spinet piano in cherry wood. I really didn’t want to give it away so since I have a very large living room, my husband agreed we could get rid of the 70-gallon fish tank we never used that has been sitting in the corner of my living room for 20 years sans fish and water. The piano sits tucked nicely in that corner now, but I’m really rusty at playing. Having played the flute for several years, I find I’m having difficulty reading the bass clef.

My parent’s wonderful neighbor, who has become a friend, took my dad’s chair for the local homeless shelter so I wouldn’t have to watch it go into a dumpster. She also took my mom’s sewing machine for her mother.

Since the house sold in 3 days, I had to scramble this week to get everything out since the buyer got approved and the closing has been set. Enter the junk guys. The company I hired was the only one I could find who would come to that location even though it’s not in the middle of nowhere so I don’t quite get that. The gentleman who owns the company and another worker arrived to haul everything away. I watched them bag up the Beethoven Centennial Collection and my mother’s custard dishes. (I kind of wish I had saved the custard dishes, but I’ve brought home enough stuff already), old luggage, a vacuum cleaner, about 400 books (ouch), old electronics including a computer, two tape duplicating machines, several old stereo speakers, some old radios, two large reel-to-reel tape players, some cassette tape players (my dad had at least 15 of those in the house). They took some casserole dishes, a coffee maker, a couple boxes of bank statements I didn’t bother to shred (they’re dead, what’s the point? - besides the shredder sold at the estate sale anyway).

They worked for 4 hours. This was what was left after giving all the clothing to Goodwill Services, filling an 8 x 12 x 4 dumpster, at least 100 bags to the curb along with a couple of bookcases, and after an estate sale.

I’m exhausted.

My father maintained the house. It’s bright and cheery and clean, but my God for the stuff. I’m going back over today to sweep the basement and grab the box of stuff I have left to bring home - stuff I couldn’t let go in a dumpster, and take pictures of the house empty. I have pictures of the house empty from before they moved in, pictures of it full before the purge and during the purge, and now we have come full circle.

I didn’t grow up in this house, but I’ve gotten to know it intimately in the last several weeks. Now that it’s empty, I kind of have to let go. Even though I brought home loads of photo albums, old post cards, pocket watches, my mom’s recipe containers, which my daughter is keeping, the piano, an old wine chest, a couple of my dad’s hats, my mom’s scarves, my dad’s old cameras and several other things, I know it’s going to hit me that they are really gone when I walk into that closing next week.

They no longer live in that house. They now only live in my memory and my heart.

I’m sitting here trying to make a paradigm shift. For the last several years, I’ve lived on the emotional basis of “what’s going to happen next?” That low-level I-can’t-really-completely-relax feeling you get when you’ve experienced a bunch of trauma and loss for an extended period of time. It’s the “when is the other shoe going to drop” feeling when you’re always on guard for something unpleasant to happen so that even minor inconveniences become painfully scary. Like a person with exposed nerve endings.

It’s like being carried on a wave where you have no control over where the water takes you. You are just trying to keep from drowning.

In the last 6 years I’ve lost both brothers-in-law and in the last 6 months I’ve lost both parents. There are several other things going on that I can’t write about in a public blog. Oh, don’t get me wrong, I certainly realize I have it better than many people, and this is not a complaint blog, but I’m just trying to sort out on paper how to shift my psyche from the dark side. The side of fear and anticipation of problems, to the side of “when life hands you lemons...”

I don’t know what to do today. It’s been 3 months since my father died, and I still have not written my thank you notes to those who came to the funeral or sent flowers. I should probably do that today. I’ve been busy trying to clear out his house and take care of all the paperwork. I have the day to myself, I have nothing really pressing today other than some laundry, but I can’t figure out what to do. The weather is too lousy to take the camera outside. My daughter is off doing something for the weekend and my husband just went to a chess club, so here I sit with my own scattered thoughts. These thoughts bounce around in my head telling me to do one thing, then another - read this book, watch this DVD, clean this room....I feel like a pinball.

I really admire people who can partition things off in their mind and emotions and just concentrate on the task at hand. I can do that at work, but my personal life feels like Hungarian goulash - a mixture of everything left over in the refrigerator all thrown together.

I guess writing this blog is my entry into the day. Now, I just have to walk through the maze and find my way to the other side.

My mind is blank. For a few days I’ve been trying think of something to blog about, and nothing comes to mind, so I thought I would write a blog about nothing.

What is nothing? Is it actually the absence of something? The removal of something that was there before?

Sometimes I wish I had nothing so I could start over and limit my stuff to a manageable pile. But if I had nothing, I’d have nothing to create something with. When God created the earth, what did he make it out of if the world was “void and without form”?

Some say when you meditate you should think of nothing. But even the word nothing means something. I mean, you get a mental picture from the word nothing of an empty room or an empty table or an empty container. The room, the table and the container are all something, so they negate the concept of nothing.

Nothing also brings to mind the blank white canvases I’ve seen in several museums done by several painters (Rauschenberg, Rodchenko). (I wonder how much these museums paid for nothing? Maybe I should post a photograph of nothing and see if it sells.) On the other hand the canvas board is something so it’s truly not nothing. Even if I left this blog blank, with just a title, there would still be a blank page, which is actually something.

This blog is the result of getting up really early because I could not keep nothing in my brain so I couldn’t sleep. (Think about that sentence for a minute. It’s actually not poor grammar).

I guess I’ll end this blog now because I have nothing more to say. The next blog will hopefully actually be about something.

I held an estate sale for the last three days to sell my parent’s belongings and furniture except for the items we brought home to keep. I was disappointed that nobody sat down at the piano and played Bach, and nobody bought any of the furniture except for one couch and a table from the basement. I did, however, sell my dad’s computer and printer and most of his extensive record collection – I was giving the records away at the end and a couple who was interested in vinyl took most of them which included a lot of 78 rpms.

I still have a lot of books left, old electronics, a vintage desk and all the furniture upstairs, except for two televisions and a stand. I kept hearing people open and shut the old Philco refrigerator in the basement, which still works better than a lot of the new ones, but nobody made an offer on it. That thing is going to be a bear to get out of the basement, but oh well.

Nobody bought the really nice gold-rimmed University of Michigan glasses, which I will now take to work and give to my boss for his son who graduated from there.

Other than that, most of the tools in the garage sold very fast. The dishes and cookware took a little longer and the books and a lot of the other stuff in the house took even longer than that, but enough stuff sold so that I can now stage the house for sale. Well, I still have to get some of the stuff out of the basement, but it’s much emptier than it was before.

Now we have to try and sell the furniture online and start putting some of the other stuff out for the “pickers”, like old shelving and boxes of obscure magazines I was trying to give away, and engineering text books from the 1940s that the libraries won’t even take as a donation, empty binders, etc.

I don’t know what to do with my mother’s sewing machine. It’s in its own blond wood cabinet with 3 drawers and the machine itself is all metal as it was made in the 50’s. I guess I’ll donate that as well, unless my daughter can sell it online.

I’m sitting here feeling very strange about the coffee table that my dad made. It went out the door late today. I have pictures of myself in my brownie uniform sitting on that table. It will be sadder when my daddy’s chair goes out the door, but there’s just no room for it. I have plenty of pictures of it in use, however, so that will have to do.

As I was sitting at the house waiting for people to come through, I started writing a small biography of my parent’s lives and writing that did two things. First, it brought up a lot of memories of things I had forgotten about, and second it revealed some gaps in my knowledge of certain things like exactly how my parents met. I think it was through a mutual friend, but I don’t know the details. I think I will be able to fill in some of the gaps when I go through the old letters and scrap books I brought home. I just can’t do it today. I’ve shuffled, rearranged and thrown out enough stuff this last month and I need a break.

It’s time to rest a couple of days before I go back and “stage” the house so someone else can move in and make their own memories.

I have to step back awhile
From the piles of sheet music
The dead and dusty radios
The carcasses of dead computers
The cameras that hold no images

I have to step back awhile
From the scissors mom cut my hair with
From the slide rule dad taught me to use
The huge blond desk where I used to sit and draw
The sewing machine on which I learned to stitch

Hard to condense 90 years of life
Into a two month purge
Harder still to sell daddy’s chair
And the piano I learned to play on
The Patty Play Pal doll they kept
Waits on the couch for a new home

Today, I take a break. I will stroll the Saint Clair art fair. I may go out and shoot some things, and I will do yoga. All the lifting and bagging and sorting at my parent’s house has made my shoulders and my hips hurt – kicked up my osteoarthritis. And there’s so much stuff in the basement. I can’t really clean down there until some of it sells anyway. Rock and a hard place. Well, the ad is in the paper. I’m committed to a date and time, so the price stickers will be flying when I go back over there. How do you put a price on 94 years of stuff and 62 years of memories?

I have never posted two blogs in one day, but I had to write about the last trunk. If you have not read any of my previous blogs, I’m clearing out my father’s house and I have found literally tons of stuff tucked away. Today I went to throw out some more stuff and I finally went through the last trunk.

There are two trunks in the basement, one of which was pretty much empty, and the other, older wooden trunk I had left for last because it contained a few things from my grandmother who died in the famous Spanish flue epidemic of 1918-1919 when my father was 10 months old. There were some old handkerchiefs and gloves that were pretty musty from being in the basement. I know someone lovingly embroidered around the edges, but they were falling apart and smelly, so I threw them out. I found my hoarder father had kept all his valentines from grade school. I brought some home to photograph before I throw them out because I love the 1920’s designs.

The layer under the inset tray in this trunk had miscellaneous really old things including a huge two-inch hand-made swirl marble. My grandparents lived in South Dakota near a Sioux reservation, and as I dug deeper, I found a beautiful purse with extensive beading, a beaded strap and beaded streamers on the bottom. It needs cleaning, but it’s really like nothing I’ve ever seen before. I’m assuming it’s Sioux beading, but I’ll have to research that idea.

I found my mother’s grade school pictures from about 1928-1932, pictures of my uncle in his old 1940s football uniform, pictures of my great aunts and uncles, and pictures of people I didn’t recognize.

Farther down, in a plastic bag, I found my parent’s wedding announcement (there was no big ceremony), and a letter my mother wrote to my father when he was discharged from the army. She wrote how she was looking forward to sitting with him in the evenings and listening to the radio together. The letter was very sweet and brought tears to my eyes. She told him she was looking forward to their life together. They had 68 years together, and only spent about 5 months apart before my father went to be with her.

I have been yelling out loud at my father for the past couple of weeks because of all the stuff he kept. Stuff most people would throw out without a second thought, but the last trunk was truly bitter sweet and I’m glad I saved it for last. It contained reflections of a long life together.

I finally broke down and rented a 12 x 8 x 4 dumpster on Wednesday and my daughter, my husband and I filled it in two hours. We are cleaning out my parent’s house preparing for an estate sale and to get the house on the market.

We were mainly throwing things out from the garage where we had put about 40 garbage bags (about 100 more went out previously with the regular trash), but along the sides of the garage, and on my father’s work bench (which he had in the basement in their previous house), there were literally a ton of things we got rid of.

For some reason, my parents saved every jelly jar they ever used. I estimate we threw out over 300 jelly jars, maybe more. Wire, screws (rusted) burned out vacuum tubes (I found more in boxes I’m going to sell) broken tools, rusted tools, a taped-up electric drill, lawn chairs repaired beyond recognition, empty cassette tape boxes, broken HAM radio equipment…the list goes on.

I did find a 36-cup coffee maker, my old wooden sled, some copper wire, and 3 old microphones. I’m saving the microphones for my son, who wants the HAM radio equipment.

We’re selling the 75-rpm records that were stored in the basement for a buck apiece. My daughter spent a couple hours looking them up online, and none of them were worth very much.

My daughter is keeping the 1950’s retro blond wood end tables. I’m keeping two green metal retro table lamps (they sill work fine) and a crystal pitcher we found in the china cabinet.

Other than that, we’re selling the Norman Rockwell figurines, two Christmas trees, the hand-painted ceramics, the rest of the furniture except for one bed and another lamp my daughter wants, the piano, the CDs, the casserole dishes, the food processor, the yogurt maker, two filing cabinets, a large blond wood desk from the early 1950’s and my mom’s Singer sewing machine with cabinet, an antique wine chest, two antique trunks, a few toys, all the books except for a couple we brought home (I brought home a book on Native American artifacts to look up my dad’s arrowheads and stone peace pipes), and a retro Philco refrigerator in the basement that still works fine and is in really good condition. I’m also selling my dad’s film cameras and 3 pairs of binoculars.

I had a little breakdown a couple of days ago when I looked at my father’s first Heathkit vacuum tube radio sitting on a bench in the basement. I can’t throw that out. I watched him make it. I was probably 6 or 7 at the time. According to my son, it worked until some time last year.

I will be sad when we sell the Redwood picnic table my father lovingly re-varnished about 5 times. I spent many a summer sitting at that table with my best friend drinking iced tea.

Later today, I have a few more items to throw in the dumpster - old carpet pieces, more miscellaneous cassette tapes, a desk organizer and some empty binders – but I was completely amazed by how much of a life can go into a dumpster when you never throw anything away. I hope we didn’t pitch out anything super valuable, but oh, well.

I did keep my dad’s photo I.D. card from the University of Michigan from 1946-1947. He had an old wallet tucked away in the workbench. I think we’re through discovering things now. I’ve been in every nook and cranny including the attic.

I don’t know what to do with the shoes. Do people buy used shoes? I guess I’ll price them and find out. I can always take them across the street to Goodwill after the sale.

To be continued…

Well, I’ve been through the ringer for a good little while now. I often wonder what other people do to cope. Oh, I know there is the usual – drugs, alcohol, denial, becoming a workaholic, running 10 miles a day, obsessive compulsion – the list is as varied as there are personality types.

I consider myself a pretty normal person. I really don’t have any vices – I don’t smoke and I don’t drink. I’ve done enough of both and stopped years ago. I do take a day off from time to time. That is, I purposely don’t do anything that could be considered work and I’ve pretty much learned to quell the guilt about not doing anything for several hours.

However, there is that one small voice in the back of my head that wants to tempt me, to lead me off the path of the straight and narrow, to trip me up and see me fall.

I’m talking, of course, about my drug of choice – my heroin, my cocaine. It comes in a yellow bag, and its name is Lays. The Original Lays. For a long time, I liked the chopped and formed (and God only knows what else) Pringles. I liked the fact that they came in a can and were virtually almost always unbroken, with an abundance of that addictive salt. But I found if the can was even a little stale, the oil they use to make them tastes rancid and odd. I live in Michigan, so we have the regional Better Made brand, but they are unevenly cut and have burned spots that are hard to chew and they are quite oily for my taste.

There are also the baked varieties, but the baking process takes all the flavor out. They are dry and hard.

I go to the store and I try and walk past the yellow bags. I can usually resist and walk on by, even though I hear the soft voice calling “Maaaarrrry….we’re right heeeere. Come and pick us up. We’re freshhh, we’re crunchy, we’re saaaallllttty…” I push my shopping cart a little faster and listen to the voice fading as I move away. But then I think about them. Sometimes at night, when I feel withdrawal symptoms, I get undressed early so I won’t be tempted to go out to the store. My husband has been trained not to ask me if I want any when he shops.

But once in a while the urge is too strong. I have to give in and it involves 2 full-sized bags because I know the first bag will go very fast. In fact, it usually disappears in one day with a family member getting only one bowl. I always jealously want the first bowl. The top layer is where the biggest, unbroken, less greasy ones are and it’s pure heaven to place the salty side of that big flat crunchy thing on your tongue and feel the taste buds react.

My daughter says I have a serious problem. She’s probably right, but I don’t drive my car off the road after eating them and I doubt they will give me lung cancer. I can’t speak to my cholesterol level, but I’ve never committed a crime to support my habit. After all, a large bag is only 4 bucks and nobody looks at you disapprovingly when you buy them. It’s not like I’m obese and I’m buying four boxes of chocolate doughnuts (although I can relate to that too and I’ve leaned not to judge.)

I know I should probably meditate, do yoga and maybe clean something as an outlet when I’m stressed, but addiction can be so…addictive! I was having the cravings again yesterday so I broke down and ate a hamburger instead (I’m basically vegetarian but eat meat once in a while). This blog is meant to purge the urge. Will it work? I’ll let you know later. Or maybe not if I give in and I’m feeling guilty, although they say confession is good for the soul.

My lower back is killing me this morning. I think it’s because I have not been doing my Yoga which is partly because to do Yoga, I have to get on my bedroom floor and to get on my bedroom floor I have to vacuum it because dust gives me asthma and I haven’t vacuumed the floor for a while because I bought my daughter an air conditioner for the upstairs bedroom for the summer while she’s living here and when you have the air conditioner running off the same fuse as the vacuum cleaner, you blow a fuse that covers one complete side of my old house and in the 20 years I’ve lived here, we have never labeled the fuses so we have to try them all before we find the one that’s blown because you can’t tell by looking at it.

I really hate thinking that way, but I’ve been through so much in the last year that the thought of having to do one extra thing really bugs me and tires me out mentally and thus, my back hurts and I suffer.

The same thing used to be true of my photography – I would think, “gee, that thing over there would make a cool shot but I really don’t feel like hauling out the tripod now” and so I would, of course, get blurry photos which weren’t good for anything.

Yesterday I had to go to the grocery store, so I stopped at my parent’s house and cleaned out another cabinet (see previous bolgs) and I found my dad’s dog tags. He was 94 so he kept them a long time. Anyway, while I was in the little metal box with the dog tags, I found a little silver ring with my mom’s first initial on it. She must have worn it as a child because it’s slightly too large for my pinky finger and too small to fit over my arthritic knuckles.

I think my back hurts today because I was bending over looking for that little silver ring because I dropped it and lost it for a few minutes in the clutter around the cabinet.

How many things do we not do because we just are too tired or overloaded that we don’t want to take the few steps necessary to prepare to do the thing we really want or need to do?

I just remembered, I recently bought a Yoga mat. Maybe I’ll put that down and my face will then not be planted in my dusty floor. Or, maybe I’ll suck it up and actually vacuum. It’s rather chilly outside so that air conditioner is not running now anyway.

I need a day off. In fact, I need a week off, but I have to work like everyone else and I have to clear out my parent’s house. I’m just whining right now – using this blog to generate universal sympathy.

On a brighter note, I started going through my dad’s slides last night and found some really cute slides of my kids when they were little, and some beautiful flower shots from Hawaii my dad took when they were on a business trip there. Maybe I will go through more slides today. I don’t have to vacuum to do that. However, I DO have to sort through the piles of stuff in my den that I’ve brought home from their house to find them (sigh). Maybe I’ll just sit here and simply exist for a while….although, I do need to trim my nails before I turn on the computer and type this blog.

If you are reading this, it means I at least sucked it up enough to trim my nails and turn on my computer.

I had wonderful parents. They always supported me and were always there for me. My mother was the practical one, and was always pinching pennies, sometimes to the point of leaving bruises, but I had everything I needed growing up. My father was the most patient man I ever knew. I never heard him say an unkind word about anyone. He was intelligent and always studying something – religious philosophies, alternative health practices, UFOs – it ran the gamut.

I’m finding interesting things in the house. I found the naturalization papers for my great-grandfather when he became a citizen – he came over from Norway in the early 1800s. I found the army discharge papers for my great uncle Zack. He served in WWI.

I knew my father had a tendency to hold on to things but it wasn’t until this week I realized he was a hoarder. I’m not talking about the hoarders you see on tv who live in trash and have unworkable plumbing – you would never know he was a hoarder by walking into his house, or even looking in his closets. The closet by the front door is neat and organized as are their bedroom closets.

However…the basement is a different story. I cleaned out his desk as well as several cabinets that are jammed into the small basement. The desk was interesting, I found several things I remembered seeing when I was growing up including an old aspirin tin, an old gyroscope, a pencil you could switch leads and write in different colors with, an old set of drafting tools, an old slide rule as well as about 20 miniature plastic slide rules, rubber cement that was 50 years old, about 10 packages of scotch tape – some of which were never used – the property tax receipts for the house they lived in 20 years ago, about 20 old scratch pads yellowed by age. I got 4 large garbage bags of stuff out of the desk alone. Later, in another cabinet I found the actual black and white brochure for the desk itself and the desk is over 50 years old!

I have also stumbled across about 200 record albums and a pile of about fifty 35mm movies including “The Music Man” and a concert by the Mills Brothers. I threw out the initial pile of 3 inch floppy disks I found, but I know there’s another box full somewhere along with a large brief case full of floppy disks from a company he worked for before there were even personal computers, so why he had those, I don’t know. I think that company went out of business several years ago.

I threw out slides of various Amway meetings and trips (they used to sell Amway products), because I don’t know any of those people anyway. My daughter found a folder of jokes in his filing cabinet, a lot of which are the same jokes that ended up being traded on the internet when email became common.

I think I have gone in every cupboard and container now except another box marked “toys”, the linen closet and the attic, which I pray is an easy clean-out. I’m taking the day off from the purge because my back is killing me and I generated at least 15 more bags of stuff to go out to the garage until garbage day. There are at least 20 bags in there already and I threw out 10 bags last week and 6 the week before. That’s 51 bags of stuff that DID NOT include clothing or books. They also kept the box for every appliance they ever bought except for the washer and dryer. I think what’s in the attic are all those empty boxes. At least I hope they’re empty. I know the aluminum Christmas tree from the 70’s is up there, though.

To be continued….