First of all, as I write this at 8 in the morning, it is dark, dark, DARK outside. Really...all the lights are off in here and it could be the middle of the night. Which I hate, but I do love the rain.
Anyway, what was I saying? Right. I have holed myself up in the house for spring cleaning. Before you leap to the comments section, I know it is not spring. But when spring comes, I have to go outside and clean the outside before it gets hot as hades out there. Ergo, my cleaning seasons do not align with Earth's seasons. (Does this surprise you at all?!? Sometimes I wonder if I even live on this planet.) Winter=cleaning inside house, Spring = cleaning outside house, Summer = cleaning anything with a hose (it's hot!) Fall = organizing clothes.
Yesterday, I worked a couple of hours in E's room. I moved the furniture, vacuumed and wiped down all the baseboards behind and under the bed. I washed the interior windows, vacuumed the valances, washed the curtains, cleaned out the drawers, sorted clothes to save for S and to give away, culled 'treasures' from trash, washed and ironed bed skirts and comforters, flipped the mattress, hand washed the floor. Today, I have to brave his closet, and then start on my bedroom. (UGH)
Kids have funny ideas of treasures. E had an Oriental Trading catalog with pages that had furred from his constant rereading. (I pitched it.) He saved M's broken watch. He saved a key he found on the ground in NYC. I remember having treasures in my room, too. When you have so little independence, when you can't go buy something meaningful or receive something valuable, I guess you have to assign meaning to things you find. E's drawers were like a homeless person's grocery cart: tattered scraps of paper, unusual bottles, broken beaded necklaces, old rabies tags from the dog, remains of art projects long faded, rocks. Surely, some items found their way in to his underwear drawer on accident, but clearly others were stored there, ferreted away to be studied later. I didn't throw away most of it, and collected it for him in a jar.
I truly didn't want to pry, and won't ask him about his treasures. I wonder what he thinks about when he looks through those dear collections. I wonder if he'll remember those odd objects as an adult, the way we sometimes do: ordinary things completely imbued with mystery and meaning, recalled as shinier or larger, or somehow better than they actually were. Tokens that became talismans.
It's hard to put myself in my kids' shoes on a day to day basis. I do remember so much of my childhood, but not in a readily accessible part of the brain. I remember having an entire playroom full of toys. In that room, though, there were other things that stand out so clearly. Things I yearned to touch but wasn't supposed to, things on shelves up high, so that I could only see their lids and was left to wonder what they were like. A lot of those things didn't make it to my parents' new house. One was a piggy bank, but it was metal and heavy and in the shape of the John Hancock Building in Chicago (where was that, anyway?). Another thing was probably (in retrospect) a small brass pitcher for olive oil (coffee?) in the middle east. There were strange things too: a pelican bone that stayed in a pitcher on the bar, and (what I later discovered to be) a roach clip and rolling paper in the very very back of a drawer. (tsk tsk)
My parents recently brought a couple of totes full of crap from my childhood room. There were souvenirs from vacations, photos of people without heads, (when I was shorter, I failed to angle the camera up, so the photos were a child's-eye view of people's abdomens) small gifts. One of the things was a heart shaped ceramic box with a rose. As soon as I saw it, I knew what was inside: the torn corner of an envelope with my 3rd grade teacher's return address. I thought it made me terribly special to know exactly where a teacher spent her out of school life.
In any event, I was merciful with most of Ethan's squirrelled-away goodies. I collected a bag of clothes for the Goodwill, and a smaller bag of trash. I filled a pickle jar with his odds and ends. And realized, too late, that a winter cleaning is a battle with the dust bunnies, sure, but also with nostalgia.
I know treasures lurk in my own closet. I dread having to sort them. My closet has rescued stuffed, very loved animals (Boys: "I don't want this anymore, it's for babies.") and a Ziploc of the tooth fairy's prized baby pearls, first art projects with "moom" scrawled in crayon, locks of hair, chewed-on board books, and favorite baby outfits. There are treasures from my own youth: a favorite stuffy, my blankie, the velvet box proffered on bended knee.
When I think of all the stuff in this house (and there is a LOT of stuff) and all the times I've screamed, "don't touch that!" I think of S, too short to see the things on the lower shelves, climbing up on stools and tiptoes to explore what's there, and I have the impulse to save everything forever.
Not the best mindset when tackling an eight year old's closet.
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