We spent some hours in a bathroom yesterday, putting up a...
We spent some hours in a bathroom yesterday, putting up a ceiling. It involved the sort of rot you don’t want to know about: plumbing above had gotten old, the flange — the waxy ring that seals the toilet to the tubes which swift away your piss and shit — had, over time, over years, disintegrated. The result, a slow, sick, seep.
The large apartment on the second floor whose ceiling had been ruined belonged to a woman just south of fifty. I didn’t meet her. A parent of hers had just died and stacks of boxes made low walls in all the rooms. Somewhere, an emptied house, echoey in the absence of life and the matter that accumulates around it.
Here, in this woman’s home, so much matter had accumulated, not just the boxes from her dead parent, but a chaotic accumulation of clutter. Antique furniture, tiny sofas, tables piled high with cactus plants and empty cups and little statues, one of Buddha, arms raised in a cheer. I peeked in the rooms (“stop snooping,” said M. as always), and it was unclear which room was for sleeping, for work, for relaxing, each its own messy heap. No way to live, I judged.
On a low bookshelf by the kitchen door, three titles: Self Care; People Skills; Feeling Good.
M. and I sat on overturned buckets and ate our lunch and, looking around, I felt the urge to rid myself of things. I have about twelve chairs in the basement from my grandmother’s house. They go un-sat-upon down there, cobwebs collecting in the crotches where legs meet seat. I put meaning into them, these relics, memory-bringers, links. Maybe I ought not. For some, it’s recipes that get passed on, the secrets and techniques of how to make a meal, a link to what comes before through smell and taste, powerful and intimate. Above ground, I have things on the walls that were made or belonged to people who came before, different than a familiar meal, but powerful still. In their existence backward and forward in time, they aid in trying to understand this ongoing process of disintegration we’re all of us involved in.
