Floating

It is nearly 4 months since my mother passed away. In many ways, she has been as present as when she was alive. I know that isn't a popular sentiment or something one is supposed to say, but my days have been filled with the detritus of what was left behind. The garage is filled with clothes and artifacts of her life; the living room has her beloved china hutch filled with her objects and some of ours. And at last, I can say that I have a system that appears to be forming - the things that will be given away, the things that will be sold, and the things that will be kept.  The garage doesn't look much different than it did before, but at least I know what things are where. Or at least I did. I spent much of the past two days organizing, sorting and labeling, and then that system was thrown into a cocked hat (what does that mean anyway?) by the pending hurricane. I decided that I had better get my car into the garage and so everything was moved again so I could make enough room.  It is pretty much the nature of life these days--moving things only to have to move them again. The mavens of organization say that you should only move things once. I do it three or four times. Doesn't make a lot of organizational sense, but it isn't efficiency that is lacking exactly.

I spent last week on Fire Island at the beach house, packing and posting and putting aside the things that needed to come back to the mainland. There shouldn't have been much stuff but because we are selling the places, I assumed we needed to clean everything out, so I packed for emptied houses, leaving only  the small dressers and beds. A carter was due to come on Saturday to move everything onto his truck and then get it to the mainland and then to Vermont. So everything was piled in the middle of the living room floor and on the porch. Some of it was pre-wrapped to protect it from dings and dents. My mother's beloved teak coffee table was on its side because I had failed to remove the screws that held top to the legs, and I thought it would be easier to wrap if it was so upended. There were two large boxes of fabrics and linens, a suitcase that I almost brought with me by car, but decided to leave for those more capable of doing the heavy lifting.  It had a very large bread board, and the whale bone I mentioned before and a box of drinking glasses. There were the bottoms of the hurricane lanterns ( I asked a friend to transport the globes to my car on the mainland when she left, sure that they were too fragile to be "carted" off). There was a wall-hung bathroom cabinet that would work in our laundry room.  There were several rocking chairs. There were two ladders, a hammock, some art carefully packed in cardboard. There were some photos and dishes and our beloved wood wagon with our late-dog's name etched in its back.Oddly, I decided to bring the wood frog that was partly decayed from living on the back deck. I don't know why that was the thing I chose to bring with me on the boat, but it is. I garbage-bag-wrapped a rusty dog sculpture that several people on the beach had been eyeing: "You taking that?" There was a handful of shells that I had packed with my phone and computer chargers and brought with me.  My spare clothes wrapped much of the fragile dishware and were packed in stacked milk crates..

Sometime during that week, the man who wants to buy the houses came by with his wife. He said he wants everything. I could have left it all there (except for the wagon and the frog). He will probably tear the houses down to build his "dream house" but he says he wants to live in one while he builds the other, and "it is sooooo hard to get things here. You can leave it all!"  But by then, I was in far too deep.

Cut to the present....Hurricane Sandy is coming with 70 mile an hour winds and storm surges on the coast up to 12 feet. The houses are at sea level. Thirty six hours ago, a friend said there was already a foot of water on the paths, and his electric cart was up four feet where the garbage trucks are kept. He can't go anywhere, but he isn't planning to evacuate. The carter called on Friday and babbled about not wanting to take the risk of carting everything when it could rain....Saturday and Sunday were beautiful days. Then he said something about wanting to protect his own equipment.

I imagine that the wagon, that my mother used as a kind of coffee table in her bedroom, is now floating. Perhaps it will land on my mother's bed when the waters recede.

On the day before I left the island, I walked to the beach. I sat at a spot that my mother liked between two communities, and a place where there are no houses. I sat there until the sun began to set. The tide was going out, leaving a small sandbar parallel to the beach and an inlet separating it from the beach itself. There were seagulls and sandpipers that I haven't seen since I was a child. Their habitat is being restored and they are making a come-back. I talked for a few minutes with someone I barely knew over these years, but who had been friendly. I have a vague sense that I like him though I barely know him, and I was glad to have had the chance to pet his dogs.

The sun set further, and I distributed the remainder of my mother's ashes at sea. At dusk.

EE RIP