normal packing tape won't be enough

I promised my mother, during my home leave, I would help clean the basement.

As compared to my other plans - baseball games and beer, music concerts, boat rides, medium rare steaks, movie theaters and amusement parks and green spaces, barbecues and thundershowers, transpacific trips, national and international zoos, crisp apples and buttery avocados, and maybe some dancing or hula hoops - it is not the most thrilling task. But frankly, half of her basement is remnants of lives that I helped pack, store, hibernate, or inter into cardboard vaults.

Generic wall hangings, scrawled-over notebooks, French lit novels, half-burned candles, Chicago Transit Authority passes, extra-long twin sheets, catnip, emptied bottles of nyquil, bug spray and university decals.

Duvets with winding vines and plum flowers, matching arrangements of un-life-like silk flowers, ceramic ladies with bustles and lemon chiffon bonnets, bottles of fluorescent pink nail polish and prescription pills, bedpans, orthopedics, and unopened jars of raspberry syrup.

Stacks of mildewed engineering books, warped reams of yellowed tractor feed printer paper (the kind with holes along the right and left margins), dusty cases of dull bifocals, ID badges encased in plastic, leather wallets and worn ashtrays.

Framed pictures of domestic smiles, ceramic vases from [insert suburban-boho-chic housewares store] cushioned in bubble wrap and leafed through newspapers, unfinished scrapbooks of photographed vacations, and tiny plastic tags from nursery-bought plants (half shade, medium water).

Tangles of woolen scarves and knit caps, pointed mules and pinstripe slacks, jars of tiny paper cranes, belly dancing costumes, DVDs (alphabetically arranged) in a misplaced library-style storage unit, late night folders of EPA paperwork, buzz clippers, and bright orange cans of goldfish food (RIP, I forget his name).



Donna D. Vitucci writes about a basement here at Juked. Her haunted piles of accumulation are like those waiting underneath my mother's house. I count down days until this task with a soundtrack of a ticking clock. The interwoven theme of a bomb in Vitucci's piece, then, spoke to me.

I also like this line:

"...she loved [her brother] the way a mother loves... with no help for it, with all hope packed tightly inside her and ready to detonate."

Maybe, in a cobwebbed corner of the basement, I'll find the wherewithal to lay these boxes to rest. Or find tape strong enough until I come back for spring cleaning.