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edit: oh, this wouldn’t post last night. Let’s see if it works now?
My entire self hurts.
I spent 12 hours yesterday cleaning out Middle-Little’s apartment. Got down there before 8 am, packed and tidied and cleaned. Hauled two carloads of stuff– mostly, Rubbermaid totes full of her shit from two moves ago, plus assorted bits of furniture– out of the apartment and up to the farm. Kept constantly having to chivvy her along, as she moaned and Felt Anxiety and Was Tired and so on.
I can’t tell you how many tote bags I picked up and emptied of Panic Tidying Residue– a handful of unopened mail, a couple of pens, a hairtie or two, a half-empty water bottle, some unexpected object or other like, I dunno, the instruction manual for her iron, or a brand-new tube of mascara still in the bag with a receipt from June of 2016, or the keys to her luggage, or something. Clearly, it’s whatever was on the coffee table when someone was coming over and she’d left it until five minutes before until she attempted to tidy. (Possibly because at the time she was working two jobs and also in grad school, and only just arrived home herself; I’m just saying.)
The best was when those were nested. Inside the tote bag would be the above, and then another tote bag full of similar items. Rarely, I got a threefer, which was one of those things where the objects by themselves told a sad story. Sometimes it was like, the residue of some event, like, all the Christmas cards she’d been given at work, or something. (There was a lot of Christmas shit, because she had incapacitating pneumonia around that time, and also the Georgia kids were visiting so nobody was paying very much attention to Aunt Middle-Little, who was extremely ill and probably should not have been unattended.)
One of the bits of unopened mail contained the title to her car, by the way, so, it’s not like I could just disappear these. No, there had to be piles of unopened mail that I had to sort and set aside for her to pay attention to when she wasn’t So Overwhelmed.
And I was sympathetic, dear reader. I was. The whole time. It’s been weeks that I’ve been helping with this, and I have largely refrained from being cross, even when I’m busting my butt and she’s moaning to her cat about how hard life is. (Bitch, I know.)
We took both cars up at lunchtime to the farm, and have filled about a third of one of the empty grain bins in the granary with totes now. The deal, I think I’ve mentioned it on here? Maybe not? Middle-Little is invited to dinner at the farm once per week, which Farmsister wanted to do anyway, this is all my idea but Farmsister had already mentioned the dinner idea. And at these dinners, the first thing Middle-Little is to do when she arrives is to go and retrieve a tote from the grain bin section in the granary that is hers, and put it into her car.
And she is then to go home after a lovely dinner, and spend that week reabsorbing the contents of that bin into her life. If that means she throws them all out, fine. If that means she winds up with more clutter in her house as she is reunited with beloved possessions she can’t part with, fine; she has a week to get those objects put away.
Part of the plan, too, is that sometimes, to switch it up, Farmsister will bring her a tote, and visit her in her apartment, and help her. This may happen because a week was skipped, or because she has asked for help, or possibly because Farmsister’s mother-in-law is visiting again and she needs to escape. (This is the current situation. Jesus Christ this woman is Really Something.)
Anyway. We went back down after lunch and I tried very hard to crack the whip and get the last of the place tidied. I got through the last of the Anxiety Tote Bags; I wound up with an enormous bag, like one of those blue bags you can get at Ikea, filled with neatly rolled-up other tote bags (including those blue bags you can get at Ikea…)– i mean, filled. When I say there were a lot of fucking tote bags, there were a lot of fucking tote bags.
Because the evening plan was that Farmsister would come down, we’d all have dinner, and then she’d come back and actually lead the charge on cleaning. Farmsister is the kind of person who cleans things to within an inch of their lives. Farmsister is also not the kind of person who would have a lot of patience with the tote bags of tote bags. She would have opened the boxes from 2000 and made Middle-Little throw away everything in them. She doesn’t know what it’s like to have anxiety and she doesn’t know how to be kind to a hoarder.
Well, she does, but it’s hard for her, and we respect that, so we don’t make her do the part where it would be too easy to be mean to Middle-Little.
So, she came down, we went out for sliders and several beers (it was walking distance and we knew we’d be cleaning for hours, so we got silly), and then I kept up with the tidying and Farmsister cleaned like her life depended on it, and Middle-Little flitted around being distressed about it all.
At the end, her apartment was unrecognizable. It looks better than it has in about three and a half years. (She moved in four years ago.)
There’s some shit hidden behind the folding screen– mostly, though, it’s a file cabinet back there– and the trunk left foreground still needs the top cleaned off, and so does the desk. but really. There’s no before picture, but the area between the desk and where the folding screen is now was about four feet deep in cardboard boxes loosely filled with nested Anxiety Totes; next to the table there had been a typing desk, the table had been four feet deep with crap, and between the table and the door, where I’m standing, there had been two filing cabinets and each one had another two feet of crap on top of it.
In short, it had looked like my house does now, which. Let’s not.
Anyway. That’s what I did yesterday, and all last week really.
Today, I got out the door at 7:45 for flower harvest, and finished hanging up the leftover flower harvest for drying at about 6:15, and there’s still about two hours of work to do in processing some of the harvested flowers for drying that can’t just hang by their stems. But I’m so exhausted and all of me hurts.
I’d been thinking, there’s no chicken slaughter this week, I should have gone back to Buffalo this week, but I haven’t been idle one bit, so it’s just as well I didn’t.
One of the totes is all bathroom stuff; she moved, couldn’t find it, replaced everything, and then here it all is. I’m considering going through and assembling first aid kits for all the farm vehicles and work areas, then maybe making care packages for domestic violence victims or something. I don’t think Middle-Little really needs her spare old packets of Band-Aids and Pepto-Bismol back.
The only thing that really remains distressing is how poor Middle-Little is so constantly broke and crying about it, and yet simultaneously is constantly purchasing objects. I understand this object was on sale, but you would have saved even more money by simply not purchasing it. She is a smart person and presumably knows this, and yet, here we are.
My house looks like a hoarder bomb went off in it but at least I don’t own multiple carpets with the tags still on them or, what really stands out to me, forty-seven wallets. “I carried that one forever!” “It still has the tags on.” “Oh, it was cheap.” “It’s forty dollars marked down to twenty-four.” “Oh. Huh.”
Somehow in all of this I didn’t wind up with a wallet, which was a shame, because I don’t own one. But. I mean. Whatever. I did get a very nice purse. And a cosmetic mirror that was our grandmother’s. I just wish M-L would buy less shit in the first place. But I can wish a lot of things.
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