Dirty Little Secrets

It took three people and two solid weeks to clean out Mom’s mess. It took her less than six months to return it to squalor.

chapter 5

11:10 a.m.

Two weeks. As much as I tried to be positive, I couldn’t ignore the fact it had taken us two entire weeks to clean out the house back then, and there were three of us doing it—now there was just me and a whole lot more stuff.

Mom was lying in the back of the house, but at least she was in the hallway. This way, I only had to clear the places the paramedics would see as they dragged the stretcher through the house to get her. Any room that had a door could be shut away from prying eyes, and I could deal with them later. I didn’t have to do the whole house in the next couple of days. Just the visible parts.

Still, I had no idea where to start, and taking it in as a whole made it look impossible. But impossible wasn’t an option.

Mom always said you eat an elephant a bite at a time, so I tried to concentrate on one little part of one room. I walked back to the front door and turned around, trying to find the spots that would make the most difference. I tried to see it as someone new would, someone who hadn’t gotten used to seeing piles and piles of junk as they expanded over the years until they were as much a part of the house as the couch or dining room table. Not that you could actually see the couch or the table under all the garbage.

Obviously, I would have to start with the front hallway. At some point, Mom had covered this part of the mound with a sheet so it wouldn’t look so bad in case someone caught a glimpse of what was inside the house. Cautiously, I lifted a corner of the sheet and peeked underneath. As far as I could tell, it was the same assortment of clothes, mail, newspapers, and plastic grocery bags resting on the ever-popular green bins that were scattered through the house.

As I put the sheet back down, I noticed a familiar box about halfway down the pile. I pulled it out and lifted the cover to see that the slippers were still in there, just as new as they had been when I’d given them to her for her birthday a couple of years ago. I’d looked hard to find some that matched her old ratty ones almost exactly, and she’d seemed happy when she opened them. But here they were in a mound of junk, while her old nasty ones were still snug on her feet.

I walked back into the dining room and opened the first box of trash bags. The bag made a sharp snapping sound as I shook it open—it was the sound of efficiency and organization and somehow it made me feel a little better.

The top of the nearest pile held the mail from the past few weeks. The whole place was like some sort of archaeology site—the layers closest to the top had the most recent stuff, while the layers on the bottom were probably six or seven years old. As I crammed the fliers and ads into the first bag, I started to feel guilty about just throwing it all away. Mom always said she’d recycle all this stuff—it’s one of the reasons she had for keeping it. I could at least recycle the newspapers, but they would be too heavy for the garbage bags. Luckily, we had a huge stack of boxes in the garage. Mom never threw away a good box.

On my way to the garage, I tried not to look toward her room, but I couldn’t help it. Something moved and I jumped, but it was only a fly. A big, shiny, greenish black fly. It sat on a yellow magazine, changing and shifting direction every few seconds like it was waiting for something to happen. Weren’t flies supposed to be hibernating or something when it was this cold out?

I couldn’t stand to see it there, rubbing its legs together in anticipation, so I made my way back to the front hallway and grabbed the sheet that was covering the monster pile by the door. With the grimy sheet over my shoulder, I inched my way back down the hall until I was standing at Mom’s feet. In one quick movement I flung the sheet over her like it was some sort of magic trick. And it worked. Mom had used the sheet to make the junk in the hallway disappear, and now I used it to make her disappear. The fly was out of luck.

It felt much better to have Mom all covered up, so I worked my way to the garage. It took several minutes of digging to get a couple of boxes from the pile that was stacked against the garage wall. The garage was what the house aspired to. It was so packed full of stuff that it seemed like there was no way to cram even one more tiny item into the overwhelmed space. There wasn’t even a real path through the stuff anymore. If something needed to be stored in the garage, most of the time we just stood in the doorway and tossed it as far into the mess as we could. A long time ago, someone had put plywood up in the rafters in an attempt at organization, but now everything that was up there just made the beams in the ceiling sag until they almost met the piles on the ground. The whole space had an air of impending doom.