Tuesday, May 30, 2006

Things from boxes (pack ratius)

This weekend we emptied out our storage unit. Soon I will post the before pictures of our living room and then the now pictures. I told a friend we had unloaded and she came to see it today. She said I had "grossly unexaggerated" how much stuff there was. And then she laughed.

The view from the front porch is almost completely obscured by empty boxes (yes!) and large amorphus clumps of bubble wrap. We are unpacking boxes from over 3 years ago, when we were in Vancouver and N was barely crawling his funny, side-winder crab crawl. Some of the boxes are unopened from our move to Dallas.

The boxes are like time capsules. I uncovered a sketch book that S gave me for Christmas one year. Amidst the meager drawings and colors are a couple diary-like entries. The first is of a trip to Salt Spring Island. It was a beautiful trip and there are moments of that trip that come back and hit me as if they were yesterday. Another entry also hits me like a brick, and it brings sadness with it. I jotted it down after Betsy died.

The air in the house is hot tonight
stiff, so it is hard to breathe.
And the house is full
of busy-ness with my mother &
my baby & it is hard to grieve.
But grieve I do
in the silent pauses between the busy-ness,
the moments of calm.
It overwhelms me at stoplights
between conversations & chores
in the shower as I rinse
And at dusk
as I stare out at the unmoving leaves on the trees.
They are silent and stiff too. Watching me?
Grieving like me?

-June 6, 2003

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

sigh....

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