Giving Up

This week, I replaced the vacuum cleaner and the refrigerator in the safe house in mid-Michigan. The vacuum cleaner was an old red Hoover. We never found bags that really fit in it and the suction never worked. It would pick up some of the animal hair, but that is about it. The cord had been vacuumed over a number of times, and my mother repaired it with black electrical tape.

The refrigerator is a whole other story. Three years ago, when I was here for my mother’s funeral, the refrigerator would run and run then there would be a huge thump and it would go off for a little while and then the cycle would start again. By the time we arrived to live in the house, the thump had stopped and the refrigerator just buzzed and buzzed and buzzed all of the time. A few weeks ago, the freezer stopped working. Now we have a shiny, new basic refrigerator. The new appliances are growing in the house.

In spite of the new appliances, the house still feels like my mother just gave up at some point. This is hard to accept because my mother was extremely ambitious and ambitious about material things. She wanted a swimming pool, a grant piano, a trip to Hawaii. She achieved all of those things. She was constantly saving for the next thing: clothing, furniture, make up. She wanted particular things and nothing would stop her form getting them. I learned from my mother that many things can be done on sheer will alone.

So it is odd, discomfiting to realize that at some point those ambitions ended. She wanted to have a beautiful home and wanted everyone to know she had a beautiful home. Yet, over the past twenty years, nothing has been done to the house.  My father will say that much work has been done: new windows, a new furnace. Still the home feels rundown, even neglected. It is unusual too for Michigan where people regularly renovate bathrooms and kitchens, recarpet floors, redo rooms. At some point, she let the house slide into its current state, worn, in disrepair, neglected.

I fantasize about renovating it, making it beautiful. That is what I miss most of all living here in Michigan. Beauty. Being in a space that is beautiful as I see beauty and having that beauty echoed back to me every day. I would like to make this house beautiful, to give my mother posthumously beauty restored. I cannot do that, however, so I will give her and my father clean and empty. The house at our eventual departure will be clean and empty. In that, there will be beauty. Not completely the beauty I desire, the beauty I remember, the beauty I want restored to my life, but a type of beauty and a type that will make me happy at least briefly. And, in this process of making this house where I grew up clean and empty, I will make myself a commitment to not give up, to live differently at the end than mother.

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