Cleaning Closets

                                                              



They're just things, right? But oh the things I threw away when you left. Photographs of course, torn to bits, what else to do with them?  The dog - eared Snoopy cards of our college days, where you called me pet names and drew hearts around the words...

I gave away my old clothes, it would have been a sin to throw them out, those clothes I wore when  I was with you. Seeing them after, though, I was ashamed. The disappointment I used to see from you lingered on the sleeves, hems, settled into the folds, a mild repulsion at the middle aged woman your lover grew to be. Those clothes can't  embarrass me now, with them gone it's not as easy to be embarrassed by my old self - complacent, naive, stupid. Glad they're gone, gone, those sad, frumpy things.

I also lugged that big green bin of Christmas lights out for trash. There had to have been enough strands of lights to wrap around our block. They were my favorite kind.  The ones with the big glass bulbs that the wind clanked against the house. I put them and all those new extension cords at curbside. I'm happy somebody trash picked them; it would have been such a waste.  I bet you don't  know what those lights, the tangled mass, had come to symbolize for me. You probably don't even remember that you were putting them up that night when you dissolved, like something from a star-trek episode, into an alien right in front of my all too familiar eyes. There was no warning at all that this was to be the last year you cursed over our Christmas lights. You were so much more than annoyed that night, angrier than usual; this wasn't just a case of not getting the hooks to catch or the extension cords to reach. That night, you were roaring angry, shaking your head, grinding your palms into your forehead, rubbing your eyes on the verge of - what? "They're just Christmas lights", I told you. You took your hand from your face and looked at me with eyes that I had never seen before. You said nothing, but that look told me that it was way more than errant Christmas lights. Five minutes later, my world had imploded. I learned of your other life, your new love. I was breathing, but dead and the Christmas lights were still shining bright. So into the trash they had to go before the next Christmas rolled around.

Know what else I gave away? The stuffed dog that you bought me when we were teens, the one that you said was just temporary until we had a house and yard for a real dog someday. That was a promise you kept.  That stuffed dog came with us into our first house, she went with us to the hospital when  babies were born and sat on our bed for 28 years. I loved her, even without a nose, because the real dog had chewed it off when she was just a puppy. The real dog is long dead, and the stuffed dog got stuffed into a Good Will bag. I couldn't bear to throw an old friend like that into the trash. But I couldn't look at her without thinking of you.


There is hardly any thing here now that reminds me of you, not even my dear ones. They have so little of you in them, a blessing for me, really. Now I have my books that sing from the shelves. I can hear you laugh over that, and not nicely either, but, go ahead, laugh, it wouldn't cut at all anymore. And just so you know, even if the books don't quite sing, they are inclined to whisper - she lives here, she matters, she does.

Personal Sun

When I was a young college girl from middle America doing a social work internship in a blighted urban community at an all -male correctional facility, I spent most of the time in wide-eyed learning mode.  My mentor, and everyone else who worked there, never tip-toed around words, in fact they had very colorful speech that was punctuated with every profanity I had ever heard and then some. I remember once making an observation, thinking, wow, I can't believe I am seeing this, understanding this. I was immediately shot down with cynicism, and this response, "Yea, well that's pretty ------- obvious; that isn't anything new under the sun."  I shut my ordinarily shy mouth and kept most of my observations to myself for the duration of the internship.  Of course as time went on, I saw that this mentor was right, I was not saying anything new. I was just giving airspace to all that had been said before and before and before that too. But my mentor was also wrong, because it was new to me. It was a revelation that had just dawned brightly under the sun -to me - and in giving life to it, by announcing it, I was adding to the affirmation of it being so.

With this in mind, all you seasoned bloggers, please take kindly to today's observations, since I am very new to any blogging community and posting these reflections are baby steps for me. But I have learned some things here already. 

For starters, I really enjoy poking around other blogs, listening to people across the ocean talk about the very things in my heart, looking at photographs of some one's backyard and feeling like I was there, experiencing it with her, a stranger, yet new "friend" in this sphere.

 I wonder what entices most of us, to share what  we do, what we know, what we feel, what we dream? I felt a little full of myself, beginning this blog, too self absorbed.  Who after all, if they ever found my blog in the first place, would care what lurked in my middle-aged heart? But I wrote it anyway; I'll write it again. 

When I began posting on here, it was to reach out to some others who might be where I am; to maybe offer a little insight, a way to connect. But it was also just for me, a way to talk so that I would have to listen to myself. I think I often didn't want to hear what was in my own heart, lest it be too painful or pathetic. But so far, in the few posts I have braved, it hasn't hurt that much at all.

I know there are those whose first goal here is to monetize.  A lot of us, I think, wouldn't mind that being a consequence too, if we ever had the time to figure it all out. But that goal cannot be what is calling most of us to share on here and in turn to follow each other.  

So maybe, a lot of what is going on is a sort of treasure hunting - the treasure being beauty in its many forms whether that be in the simple pleasures of being human, the wonder of the natural world or even in the darker side of biting sarcasm.

Good cooks on here share the most fundamental of treasures and recipe seekers delight in the collecting. Crafters share the simplicity of the seemingly complicated, the methods, the instruction, the materials needed, all secrets that could have been kept but are generously set free for discovery by like minded creators. Politicians, poets and reformers give voice to the often ugly side of human nature or the plight of the hungry, the sick. Their work to enlighten others about the tragic, is beautiful effort, their persuasive ability, a treasure. Artists hold up their work, for recognition, for admiration, but also to show what they have found, the treasure they have discovered in the design of that old iron gate.  See here? See this scroll? See the way the shadows sleep inside the curvature?  The photographers among us show the beauty they have found in their own feet amidst autumn leaves, the patterns of brick on a favorite building that others have walked by again and again without seeing; the shutter clicks and gives glimpse to what would have been missed if not for the treasure seeker and their eagerness to share. 

And what about the hurting among us, those who are healing or have healed, and want to share their introspection, their ah ha! moments, the bittersweet and the painfully beautiful moments of life?  Some writers uncover treasures of the human spirit and by way of word, want to give shape, to the beauty of their growth and the new-found fullness of their lives.  

And all of us in doing any of this, by making a record of it, have made it real, have created the opportunity of it being found. Taking our own thoughts, feelings and talents and offering them up for discovery gives us a chance to touch other lives in a remotely personal way.

Nothing new at all under the sun in this observation. But it is new to this brand new blogger, just wanting to give space, to give form, to the pleasure of treasure hunting with you.