empty boxes

Empty can mean two things: fear or opportunity.

The first box is always the hardest to fill, when you're moving. Take a deep breath, pour a glass of wine, brace yourself to sit down cross-legged on the floor in front of the first, yawning, empty cardboard box. What stays with you? What is thrown away? What is kept but packed away carefully, knowing that it will not see the light of day for some time to come? Where do you begin?

My mother moved to Port Angeles, WA, this weekend. She has lived in England for the past eleven years, and this was the first time she had been to the Olympic Peninsula, the second time to the Pacific Northwest, and the fifth time to the west coast. She recounted these statistics aloud during the long drive that my brother, Erik and I took to help her move.

The drive up was beautiful. I-5 follows the Columbia River for a while, giving peekaboo glimpses of imposing Mt Hood and Mt St Helens' snowball dome, and the deja vu views recalled last weekend, when Erik, Aspen and I drove up to Vancouver, BC. Soon after the turn onto 101, in Olympia, the terrain grows more dense as civilization drops away, and everyone in the car got more restless.

The snow-studded Olympic Mountains appeared, impossibly steep. My mom got so excited, almost bouncing in her seat, keeping up continuous chatter. We turned off the main road, wound in on roads skirting semi-rural parcels of lived-on land. Abruptly up an overgrown gravel track, steep and hung over with tree branches, brambles, tall grass. It's dark with all of the green, Ted forcing the car along, until we emerge in the clearing of the house. We're not sure it's the right one-- there are abandoned cars around, which my mother didn't know about-- trying different doors before one finally opens with the key and this Thing, her move, is made concrete.

The house inside is a monument to consumerist pack rats with far-flung interests. Empty brown beer bottles from what must be a lifetime of drinking, books, a plate of buttered rye bread, a small bowl with gelled scrapes of mayonnaise, clothing, boxes, bags, hats, pillows, glass display cabinets of tiny figurines, stuff, stuff, stuff. I have not seen its like since high school, a friend who grew up in a home like this. All four of us wander around. Ted tries to open things, fix them. Erik tries to get a computer up and running. Mom follows Ted. I flit like a butterfly, looking at books, alighting on some from my childhood love of scifi. I keep thinking that I will see something in the massive piles of stuff that will call to me.

Finally, after an hour of this, Mom asking Erik which bed we want to spend the night in as if that's possible through the years of dust and piles of possessions, I realize: we cannot leave here unless she has somewhere to sleep.

Ted, Erik and I set to clearing the room she finally chooses. We clean out fur from a long-haired white cat, urine stains, abandoned spider webs, mouse turds. Ted takes apart the bed, dusts and vacuums. Erik moves piles and boxes and shelves into other rooms. I go through drawers and throw things away into black trash bags, which just get stacked with everything else. Mom coughs, gasps for air, disappears for hours.

We clear and clean her entire room, and most of her bathroom. It's an island of calm in a hurricane house flooded with junk. At 8pm we finally go into Port Angeles for dinner, and to Walmart for supplies. And then we leave her. Ten at night, we say goodbye and quickly put up the tinted windows of the rented SUV. It's not completely dark out yet. I see her face, red even in the low light. We're gone before her expression can change.

It's impossible to think. Ted drives the whole way home. Even though it's 2am, we've been in the car for nine hours that day, spent six hours cleaning, none of us sleep.

It is done, but it's just the beginning.