Back Bay View: The last days

Monday, May 13, 2013

The last days

Time has been travelling at warp speed around here. Last week was spent packing up. We don’t actually have to pack the boxes, which should make things easy, you would think, but we have our share of labor to do getting ready for the packers to do their thing: clean out closets, empty pencil boxes, sort out batteries, take down pictures, disassemble bunk beds. Lots of little jobs get compounded.

On the one hand, I love this opportunity to shed extra junk. Goodbye, puzzles no one solves. Goodbye, pack and play with a mouse hole. Goodbye, papers from 2007. But sifting through things takes longer than it should with me, because I’m faced with making decisions like what to do about a t-shirt with a bleach spot that I would still wear, even though I have plenty of other choices, but would anyone else? Give it away or throw it away? How about those cleats with mud stains that I can’t scrub away? They don’t fit my kid anymore, but does anyone else want cleats with a brownish Nike swoosh? Glass jars? Old puzzles? Old videos? Cassette tapes?

Once again I am confronted with the amount of junk we own, and the waste of what gets thrown away. Consumer culture at its finest. We perhaps did better at fighting the accumulation of new stuff for the two years we have lived here because we don’t have Walmart and Target, but the Legos must breed in the dark closet, the flipflops clone themselves, and t-shirts from 5Ks sneak their way in the door, along with prizes from goodie bags, craft supplies, and a fair share of books.

But progress was made: I’ve got a nice pile of stuff to take away to the Catholic Social Services garage sale. Found homes for the fish, guinea pigs, and rabbit. Sold the big car, which makes me both want to sing and sigh because I’ve always had a love/hate relationship with it. I’ll being sighing even more when we have to sign over our life’s blood for a newer vehicle with less mileage. We had a hard time selling our 10yr old vehicle with almost 187K on it, even here, where “Guam bombs” are perfectly acceptable modes of transportation. The mileage scared quite a few buyers. The car was still going strong. Part of me wishes we were bringing it back to drive another 10 years, even if we have to buy a new transmission. But the other part of me doesn’t want to be sitting in a broken down vehicle in the middle of New Mexico on a hot, dry road trip with six kids. Once we bought a mini-van on our 4^th anniversary. Looks like we’ll be buying a new suburban for our 17^th.

********

The pack-out went reasonably well, although I scared the girls and a neighbor on the first day, when I lost my cool with the packing team. They started taking apart the kitchen table the first thing. And they stacked the oriental rugs on top of the upholstered chairs. I was already frustrated because they showed up 4 hours late and then took an hour and a half lunch break. I tried not to show my extreme frustration, but my daughter said my face looked ugly and she wanted to hide. And my neighbor said the same thing when he came by the next day to see if I was okay. But after the initial blow up, I settled down, and they settled down, and they seemed to be careful packaging everything up for its transcontinental voyage. We’ll find out in 45-60 days.

So in the meantime, we’ve been enjoying the simplicity of only having one set of dishware for the family. One big pot, one big skillet, one big bowl. Rinse, reuse. We have the loaner furniture again that we had at the beginning of our stay here, which makes our house look like a Spartan hotel, easy to clean, plenty of open space to run around, plenty of Scotchguard on the fabric.

************

We’ve also been trying to see as much as we can. We got two hikes in this weekend – one to a waterfall and one to a cave. Beautiful. Fascinating. I love caves, especially when you can actually explore them and not just follow a roped-off path behind a guide. I love jumping off waterfalls, although I don’t always love watching my kids jump off.

The paths to these places are sometimes hard to find, rarely marked – an occasional bit of pink string or plastic ribbon to mark a turn – which makes the hike that much more exciting. The kids aren’t always happy to go – they complain and whine as we pack up water bottles and slather on sunscreen – but once we hit the trail, their spirits rise and they chatter and make up stories and throw mudballs at each other. It’s family time at its best.

*************

Other fun family time: Mother-daughter book club finally got underway last month. We’ve been meeting once a week – read A Wrinkle in Time for the first book, then the abridged version of Journey to the Center of the Earth, which reminded me why I don’t bother with abridged versions. Boring! They don’t even try to develop character. Then we read Hurt Go Happy by Ginny Rorby, which is a book about a deaf girl who makes friends with an old man who has a pet chimpanzee who can sign. The girl’s mother doesn’t want her to learn to sign because she’s afraid it makes the daughter look handicapped, and she doesn’t want people asking why the girl, Joey, is deaf (her father beat her). The book club girls loved this book. It’s a bit melodramatic, and I was a little uncomfortable with how much the girl stood up to her mother, but it was moving on a variety of levels. Prepubescent girls and their animal stories – I’m sure someone has someone written a thesis on this. I am happy my daughter has found friends who love books, and she’s found some books to love. Although I’d rather have her loving the classics, I am glad that she’s finding interesting characters to identify with.

The other YA book I read because my daughter got it at the library was Circle of Secrets by Kimberly Griffiths Little. It’s set in Louisiana on a bayou. It, too, is a little melodramatic. It even has a ghost. And it kept me up to 1 am. The girl in this book, Shelby Jayne, is the daughter of a “traiteur” who leaves her and her father to go take care of her grandma, who lives on an island in the swamp. Of course, swamp island living is somewhat romanticized in this story, although alligators are a constant threat. Shelby has to go live with her mother when her father has to go overseas for work. This book also has some dysfunctional family issues, but the family works it out in the end. And even though the mother is accused of being a witch, she makes it clear that when she prays over someone, it is God doing the healing, and not her.

***********

In addition, we’ve had a couple parties to go to which were enjoyable, Friday night track meets, which I love oh so much better than Friday night football games. No one is going to get pounded on! No complicated rules. Not nearly as much attitude. The competitors treat each other with respect, most of the time. Some of the kids participated in a kids' triathlon. We've done a little bit of math and language arts, but school is basically over for my home schooling girls, and the boys turn in their school work on Friday. I turned in my grades at the community college. I was planning to write something about schooling this semester, but it may never happen, like many good intentions. Time is short, and I keep getting distracted by hanging out in the street, as we did last night, drinking a glass of wine with the neighbors while the kids played "rental shop" and "lost hut girls" on their bikes long after sunset. (ok, I admit, and looking at Craigslist and Facebook...)