Housekeeping

She's not what I'd call typical. 

The girl was getting ready to come home from college for the holidays, but she needed to do a little housekeeping first. 

"Hey ... can you do me a favor? Can you put nine dollars in my college bank? Our machines don't take cash or credit, they only take College Bucks."

She didn't want to be the kid who brought everything home in need of a wash.

"Sure, but it will cost you. I need a personal shopper:  Do you think your brother will like these?" 

I sent a link to what must have appeared to her sensibilities to have been The Most Hideous Pair Of Sneakers On The Planet. The Kind No Self-Respecting Teenager Would Ever Wear In A Million YearsTM. 

"You can't be serious," she shot back adding a link to a pair that I Never, In A Million Years, Would Have Guessed He'd LikeTM."

It will be good to have her home.  Even if it's not all sugar and spice. 

This is all I could think about as the gingerbread house sat beside me in the car, filling the cabin air with holiday cheer and filling my heart with glimpses of Christmases past. 

Fourteen to be exact. 

It hasn't been every year that I've managed to procure one of these seasonal kits from our local bakery, but I've scored enough of them for the kids to think of it as one our most enduring traditions. 

It brought the whole family together in a kind of frayed patchwork that makes us quirky and unique. 

My husband will crack his knuckles in anticipation of how his hands will cramp as he uses them, in a vice grip fashion, to apply steady pressure to the piping bag that I, in my only job aside from purchasing, had filled with royal icing. The kids will loudly unwrap what's left of the candy stash -- slowly pilfered as we bided time -- and playfully argue about a particular pattern of colorful confection and the proper way to stucco it to the dark gingerbread's exterior.

Our laughter scatters the wrappers, now empty and crumpled, all around the dining room where the sugar dust of renovation gathers. It also summons the ghosts of those who aren't with us any more. 

My mother ... in chunky sweater and still wearing her winter hat inside ... folds her arms and grins at my father, who is underneath the Christmas tree, setting up the train. 

The memories aren't all idyllic. There will be hard feelings bubbling up that might, under ordinary circumstances, create a mess. These stress of expecting too much or getting it all wrong. But even they are comforting in their own way. 

Odd Jobs

I must admit, I walked into this room with a purpose. Maybe I'd come to fetch something out of a drawer and become distracted by the myriad things that called out for attention. It's certainly a likely scenario.

But what had I been looking for? 

I know I'd come from the kitchen, where I had been emptying the dishwasher, and picked up a glass that belonged at the bar in the living room, so after I brought it there, I noticed the cat had thrown up on the couch slipcover, which I stripped off and shoved into the washing machine down the hall. Of course, the detergent box is empty, so I have to run out to the car where I had left the replacement because storage for that kind of thing is at a premium (I'm not a fan of stockpiling) so I keep the recent household chemistry haul in the trunk.

Had you walked into the house at the moment (past the woman with uncombed hair clawing through the boot of her car) you clearly would have seen an open washing machine, textiles spilling forth, with an item in need of recycling on the floor in front of it; a clean fancy tumbler sitting on a pile of coffee table books in the next room; an open dishwasher, half filled with clean dishes and the open cabinets where those dishes will temporarily reside; and a cat who would be hungry for second breakfast circling your feet.

The neighbor knocks, looking to borrow a thing I secretly hope won't be returned. It's just another thing that is taking up space.

I know I shouldn't be upset when she idly mentions missing having a house that looks lived in as her eyes trace the explosion of winter boots and gym bags and cardboard boxes waiting to be muscled into the recycling bin.

She's earnest. 

People make TikTok memes with adorable versions of open cabinets and abandoned tasks trying to convince us we are the victims of our disordered minds.

But I don't buy it. Evidence of a retching animal, be it sound or substance, should instinctively shuffle the order of domestic operations. It should not surprise when such an emetic eruption, even momentarily, throws the whole house into chaos.

The fractured attention we self-diagnose is just a label that might never have stuck without the modern necessity of increasing having to multitask how we multitask.

As the husband snickers to the camera about his wife's absent-mindedness, I wonder to myself "just how many butter knives has he left straddling the no man's land between the sink basin and the counter proper? He and his brethren will never see this utensil as abandoned or as a task undone because in his mind it is perfectly logical to decide on that second piece of toast ... a little later in Never.

Eventually, I will wrestle these things back into order. It won't be pretty, and I'll probably bash my head into an open cabinet door. It will be the final thing that needs to be buttoned up before I sit down.

But to be sure, the snowstorm that is life will blow through before I get up again.

It's the most logical thing in the world: Life keeps handing us odd jobs.

Cabinet of mysteries

 The box, grimy with dust and crushed on one edge, must have been sitting on a shelf in my father's garage for a number of decades. It looked like the kind of box that had been made in the 70s and sold at Hill's Stationery shop: sturdy, with a glued-on label that affirmed its contents had once been a raft of business-sized envelopes. Yellowed by time, the container was thicker and sturdier than its modern counterpart. It was something any generation might frugally repurpose. But it had clearly outlived its usefulness.

As if it knew my plans, the box wouldn't budge when I tried to slide it toward me. A task I had assumed would take only a minimal effort before I could inspect what was inside and unceremoniously pitch it and its contents into the great beyond. Which, for my purposes, was a forty-thousand-yard dumpster I'd rented to haul away all the things my father had owned that had somehow avoided eviction all these years. I increased pressure, and the box suddenly came loose, bringing with it a chip of paint from the shelf where it had stuck.

When I tipped up the lid, I found a leather-bound book tooled with flowers and smelling of age and must.

The book held sepia-toned photographs affixed to cards ... professional portraits, some of which bore the imprint of studios with Spindle and Collar City addresses. Someone had carefully inserted each photograph into the ornate windows of album's thick pages. They seemed remarkably preserved despite the fact that some had shifted over the years, their edges out of alignment, where they'd come unglued.

Known as Cabinet Cards, (I learned from Wikipedia) this style of photography hit the height of its popularity in the 1880s and 90s. And, as the name implies, were intended for display inside glass curio cabinets. The cards, however, fell out of favor by the 1920s once consumer market cameras and mass-produced picture postcards came on the scene.

As I flipped through the book, I met some unfamiliar faces: Men with wild hair and even wilder beards, the cut of their clothes suggested they were professionals, although some wore the garments of the priesthood; Women of all ages, some looking dour as they perched on the edge of an ornate settee, while others gazed sweetly into the camera as they stood wasp-waisted in layered skirts; One person, sitting ramrod straight, donning tartan togs and a high-tufted hairdo, defied gender typing. There were even a few children: girls with their long hair in bows, wearing straight-line dresses that reached their ankles.

As I continued to study the faces, it seemed entirely possible that at least some of these beautiful Victorian strangers had come from the old country only by mail. Perhaps, they were tucked into letters and sent by airmail half a world away. Just like my father's sister reported to have seen herself and her siblings on a mantle in Ireland when she made a pilgrimage there to meet our Irish cousins. Like these images those real-life relatives were essentially strangers she only knew about from reading letters traded between her late parents and theirs.

My aunt didn’t recognize anyone either. Nor did anyone in my mother's branch of the family.

Perhaps it was just a silent hobby of someone now long departed; A collection of paper wonders that would take up space on a shelf (albeit in a newer shoebox) destined to confound its next discoverer. A mystery worth living on in posterity.

Seen and not heard

I hadn't heard from her in a day.

Not a call, not a text, not even a blurry nested photo of what she was doing, and what she looked like doing it, when Be Real went live ... 

I looked at my watch. "It's been thirteen hours and one entire day."

The mission, should you choose to accept it, is getting proof of life before the NOC list gets out in the open. 

Not that the disappearance should have worried me.

As the semester's end neared, and with it, the time-gobbling tasks of course finals looming, I had told myself to expect a certain increase in cellular silence. 

Tests should trump texts despite this modern age of upheaval. 

My daughter's generation has migrated to new playgrounds that members of my generation don't easily assimilate. 

Our inner thoughts are encased by the thinnest of, yet nearly impenetrable, virtual walls.

Facebook is for the elderly, Linked-in is for the elderly who are still employable, and Twitter is a 44-billion-dollar hole in the universe where the rest of us shout into a void. 

Desperation is a text from your mom at 6:45 ... a time calculated to wake you up a few minutes before you needed to get out of bed anyway. 

In these early days of this new freedom, the message will be verbose and irritating by the sheer word count and the forced smile they intone: 

"Good morning!!! I know you are busy. But can you text back when you get a chance? Just want to know you are ok. You didn't post a photo yesterday on the only site you allow me to see (and for which I try not to comment or be intrusive in any way so that you might forget I am lurking ... like a stalker and come to regret allowing this small access). **Heart emoji, prayer emoji, smiley face emoji**"

Three dots drum their fingers on the screen and my fears immediately start to abate. 

"I'm fine. Just super busy with finals. *heart emoji, heart emoji, laughing face emoji.*"

The kids aren't here. They aren't supposed to be. That magic arc of childhood is hurtling towards the other horizon: adulthood.  

We knew the advice wasn't cliche: "Enjoy it while it lasts. You won't believe how fast time goes."

But sleep deprivation made us believe that we could be the exception. 

 

Our kids will call. They will write. They will visit every chance they get. And when they visit they will spend quality time ...

... with their friends. Or the kids who were not their friends, but who, with the hindsight of maturation, friendship was just a delayed opportunity. 

Which can be rectified over winter break. 

Our kids are still here.

Even when they aren't here. 

When they are out living their lives.

So, by this time next year, I fully expect to be able to text a "You good?" And get a thumbs-up emoji. As it should be.

But I'm not giving up hope of hearing her voice ... when she gets tired of typing and has more than a few words to say, she records a voice memo and sends it back in the chat. It self-destructs after playing.