I haven’t been working on my tree-cutting/path-building project for the last few days because a completely unrelated project jumped to the front of the priority list. The real estate agent has found a buyer for the house my brother and I have had on the market since my mother died last year. We had done some cleanup but had left a lot of stuff in the house for two main reasons. The first is that we wanted it to look lived in. The second is that we are procrastinators. The buyers want to move in on April 15, so now we can’t procrastinate any longer.
We actually got a reprieve. The buyers originally wanted to move in on April 1.
My brother and I have been making trips to the house every so often. It’s easier for me than for him because he lives more than an hour away in Chattanooga.
My father, who died back in 2000, was a collector of stuff. It’s really hard to categorize a lot of it any more narrowly than that. He had a lot of tools, including some that look like they were designed sometime around the turn of the last century. He also liked to get power tools. Among the tools he bought was a stand-mounted drill press. It’s about as tall as I am. Its height is appropriate, because it weighs about what I weigh, too.
Now the Parises seem to have a thing for living on hills. My wife and I live on a hill, my brother lives on a hill, and so did my parents. Unfortunately, my father’s workshop is halfway down the hill from the front of their lot.
My father’s drill press is not only heavy, but also awkward to handle. It’s extremely top heavy, with a big electric motor mounted to the top. I had a hand truck, but when I tried to strap the drill press to it, it was so top heavy I couldn’t keep it upright. I had to take the cast iron base off and carry it upside down on the hand truck.
The next problem was that the ground is covered with a layer of dead leaves and pine straw, which makes for poor footing. There are also a couple of sets of steps my father built from concrete blocks. Did I mention that this thing is heavy? Well, it is, even with the cast iron base removed. I was not at all sure I was going to be able to make up to the front of the yard.
Suffice it to say, I got the thing all the way up into the carport, and here it is, still upside down.
The drill press in the carport, with stuff
My brother and his wife came down Saturday and we worked for a while going through other stuff. The hospital bill from my brother’s birth in 1947 (it was under $75, with a room rate of $7 a day). My mother’s high school diploma. Letters from my father to my mother before they were married. A nice note from my mother’s high school glee club instructor. The admission pass for a Civil Service exam my father took right out of high school. A box full of cameras. A set of notebooks with my mother’s budgets from right after the war. All the things people save for their children to go through after they die. Maybe I’ll write about a few of them later.
It really does sound like a ton of hard work. You make me see how much easier it was when we finally packed up Roger’s mom’s stuff. She had already pared down from a large 3-bedroom house to a small 1-bedroom apartment in an assisted living facility. That downsizing really helped, but still even going through the last of her things was work. A whole house full, plus a work space — yes, Sisyphus did have it easier. Good luck with it.
Robin Andrea — It’s a mixed blessing. It’s a lot of work, but it’s also an opportunity to remember. Of course it would be better if we weren’t up against a deadline.
When Kali’s mom abruptly moved from her house in the Cleveland suburbs to my brother-in-law’s house in California, Kali, her brother, and I descended on her house and packed up the stuff we thought might be valuable and/or useful. We loaded the stuff into a U-Haul truck and brought it to our place outside Philadelphia where it sits–nearly two years later–in a covered porch, waiting to be sorted through. Since Kali and I plan to move in about 4 years, we have to go through mom’s AND our own own crap.
Scott — My brother and I found a lot of stuff that we didn’t want to throw away, but we thought about it and realized that my parents (mostly my mother) had looked at these things, put them aside, and then never looked at them again, and that’s exactly what we would do if we saved them. So we threw them away, or put them in the pile for Goodwill. At least if Leah and I move we won’t have to go through the process again.
As I said in comments to a post a little later, I’m often jarred these days by things like this. If my parents died tomorrow, their house would have only been lived in for a decade or so, with no accumulations. It’s their 17th house since they were married, as my father documented last year.
The moment the last kid left, in the late 1980s, my parents held a garage sale, sold all the things they’d promised to us, and threw out all the rest. Except for a few items that my mother had saved (a lock from my first haircut). Then they sold the house and moved on, which is no surprise since that’s what they did as we were growing up.
It’s really hard for me to relate to what must be the large majority who deal with parents who have lived in the same place for decades, and who have huge amounts of accumulated stuff. And feel sentimental about it. On the one hand, it’s certainly easier not to have to deal with it.
On the other hand,… well in a way there is no other hand. Our parents were perfectly willing to discard anything that got in their way, and we siblings all expected that. So nothing really remains other than a lock of hair.
Wayne — My mother’s sister and her husband moved frequently. It seemed like every time we visited them (they lived most of their lives in Akron, Ohio), they were in a different house. They even moved to Rome once, and then to Florida. My aunt will be 94 soon. I wonder if things will be more like your parents’ situation or my parents’.