Cleaning House

Everything is disorganized.

The election campaign that I worked on has concluded, and it consumed me. It consumed every day of my week with working hours, but I also let it have my heart; the outcome was too personal to keep it away.

I let my work seep into every hour that I had previously kept sacred as mine. When I walked home from the office, or did chores around my apartment, I listened to the political news that I had missed while working. When I slept, I was visited by my projects and colleagues in my sleep. When I ran in the park in the morning, instead of seeing the trees, I envisioned tasks I planned to complete later in the day.

In those months that passed on the campaign, I let a to-do list of personal tasks and relationships compound and go stale, and rejected any thoughts about where I would go after November 8th.

In the end, no matter how much of myself I committed to the election, the result was beyond my control. So much of what I stood for and threw myself into was defeated. And now it is all over, and I should have my full focus back to myself, but I’m distracted by all that is wrong or disorganized around me.

While my emotions and professional plans are in disarray, I decided I would organize what I have most control over: My physical space.

I’m staying with my father in the three-bedroom house that I grew up in. This house has weathered the upbringing of two children and one divorce. In its more recent past, it has served as the dumping ground for unused supplies and collected souvenirs between college semesters and big trips. This house has amassed the clutter that now serves as an archive for my family’s past hobbies and life milestones. For years, my father has requested, each time I returned for a holiday, that I “try to clean out my room”. “My room” is now part warehouse and part time-capsule. It is lined with the trinkets that exhibit who I was when I was 6 years old and chose to paint my room lavender. As I grew, its closet shelves grew stuffed with sports trophies I won, art projects I almost completed, and dresses I wore on special occasions. “Cleaning my room” has been a daunting task for years. But now, with all the fragments I feel I must clean up and reorganize outside of this house, “cleaning my room” feels like an easy prize on my to-do list. This is the procrastination project that I needed. I will clean my room, and everyone else’s room.

Items discarded yesterday:

Maps of friends’ houses that I had drawn with them on playdates.

Baby teeth that were left in plastic tooth-shaped containers and then packaged again in wooden boxes. I also threw out the tie-dyed cloths and shoelaces that wrapped these boxes for extra protection while they hid in a sock drawer.

I threw out a Hello Kitty wallet, only after removing the old-style 5 dollar bills, printed before the bill’s redesign, as well as the coveted 2 dollar bills which are available at banks when you ask kindly. These bills were likely the fortune I amassed after losing the baby teeth that I threw out earlier in the morning.

Into donation bags I tossed jewelry that I had received at moments in my life that warranted gifting a girl jewelry.

Into trash bags I dropped the cheap jewelry that I had bought at dollar stores or H&M. This was the jewelry that I had worn instead of my gifts because fine stones and metals intimidated me.

I threw out old socks. I threw out piles of soiled paper towels after I cleaned dust and cat pee from newly exposed corners.

I threw out filled note books that I had kept around for later reference in a subject I had mastered. Or maybe I had kept them because the thought of throwing away the documentation of hours of labor and learning was too much to stomach at the end of a semester.

What I didn’t throw out were the notebooks in which I had drawn and written poems when I was adolescent and sad. I set aside a stack of birthday notes and postcards from a deceased loved one. My anxious energy is effective for hauling bags and confronting dusty corners on my hands and knees. But those notebooks and postcards I’ll leave for another year, for a fuller me.

While I clean upstairs, I tiptoe between rooms, mindful that my father sees clients downstairs. He’s a family law attorney who after many years of working a one man private practice, has become disenchanted with arguments. He now chooses to work on wills and estates and works from home. Clients come over to sit at our dinner table and discuss how their wills should be arranged, or estates should be handled.

Today, as I prepared to clean out the drawers in the house’s only full bathroom, I heard the doorbell ring downstairs. My father welcomed in a married lesbian couple who introduced themselves with the same name. I closed the bathroom door so that the couple’s voices became muffled. I could hear my father bring them away from the front door and into the dining room. His voice was muffled too, and now far away, but I could still decipher it as he initiated the meeting with his introductory questions. My ear was too well trained from years of him calling commands up the stairs, or completing our conversations from a separate room, to let his voice disappear into the privacy of their meeting.

I opened the bathroom drawer to inspect my task at hand. Its interior was filled with hair brushes, combs, barrettes, scrunchies, and a mess of other accessories. The white bottom of the drawer badly needed to be wiped down after these items were removed; it was clouded with dust and old hair and unknown spills.

I started with the drawer’s easy contents: I threw out the bobby pins, scrunchies, and worthless items, while setting aside the jeweled barrettes. I pulled out small wicker baskets containing unopened packages of hair ties, purchased in bulk for long hair I no longer had. I extracted wooden and plastic combs. A couple of these plastic combs had been purchased the summer my brother and I came home from day camp with lice. Each night of that ordeal my parents would spend hours in the bathroom with us. After a toxic shampoo, we’d sit on the toilet or the edge of the tub as they dragged the plastic combs through our hair, peeling out traces of insects found along the way. Each morning my brother and I would then return to camp with the rest of the lousy children. The night time routine to rid us of lice continued for a month, and by the end my mother swore she’d shave our heads before dealing with lice again.

I threw out the plastic combs, set aside the wooden ones, and returned to the drawer.

I found a hair pick for an afro my father may have once sported, back when he was cool and rode a motorcycle, without the responsibility of children. I discarded the hair pick because one of its teeth was missing.

I found a round wooden brush that must have been my mother’s. I cleaned out hair from its bristles, hair that must have been left there more than ten years ago, back when my mother still had long hair and opened this drawer regularly. I assumed she had forgotten about the brush in this drawer when she has transferred the rest of her belongings from this house to her new condo. Or maybe she had opened the drawer and quickly shut it in the face of its mess.

Downstairs I could hear my father begin his preface for the harder questions he would pose to the couple across the table. These questions, he would tell them, may be painful to consider, but were important to answer nonetheless. They were questions regarding how one of them should make decisions for the other in the case of medical emergencies or other dire scenarios where one of them was left in a state where they were unable to make decisions for themselves. I imagined the couple’s distant answers concealed the sound of them shuffling their feet under our table, as they strained to reason for a future where their lives were not intertwined.

What I next pulled out of the drawer were the hair pieces given to me on birthdays. They were tangled together, wound in hair ties and ribbon I had missed in my first pass of the drawer. I wiped off their dust and set them aside.

From further in the back of the drawer I pulled out bits of beaded wire, coiled into flowers and curly cues. I remember that day when my childhood friend, Eleni, and I had gone to the art supply store by ourselves to pick out our wire and beads. We then spent the rest of our afternoon around her dining room table, bending the wire, fitting it with beads, and adorning each others heads with our finished pieces to transform our hair into fairies’ nests. I remember the feeling from that day, from that era, when our hands could create from the magic in the stories we told each other. Eleni and I are still close friends, but we no longer do each others hair.

The lift in my father’s serious tone downstairs brought me to attention as he began to inquire about the couple’s children. He would ask about how they were to be cared for if the parents were no longer alive or able. He would then dive into the details of the couple’s assets and how these assets should be transferred once their owners passed. The pair across the table would then enumerate all they had of worth. They would name their investments, they might mentally run through a list of their possessions, not focusing on which items were sentimentally expensive due to the meeting’s time limit. And after they left, and after my father wiped off the table any rings left from their glasses of water, there would be their mess of assets and possessions and worries for their children’s futures to disentangle and sort out.

I wiped down the bottom of the newly empty bathroom drawer. The surface lightened, but did not quite return to its original blank white. Inside I placed the cleaned wicker baskets, and carefully positioned the items I hadn’t thrown away either within or beside them, depending on each item’s category.

My father closed the front door behind the couple, and I closed the bathroom drawer. One more small piece of this house was “cleaned”. I have now cleared so much out of this house. I have cleared out so many past possessions, I feel a new lightness in their absence.

Everything is still disorganized, but the spaces I walk through in this house carry less weight with each item I clear out.