This isn’t garbage. It’s totally useful,” says Marshall, the
father of my child and my partner in crime, life, and everything. “It’s not
garbage.”
Our back gate is open to the alleyway, and a borrowed box
truck full of lawn debris, rotten lumber, and sundry other trash is mostly
full, mostly ready for a trip to the city dump. Marshall is holding what
remains of a rake that has just about given up the ghost: rusted, bent tines,
no handle. “Okay,” I say, “please explain what use it might have that the new
rake that is not bent and that still has a handle does not.”
Nothing.
T
he ex-rake goes into the truck. It’s the weekend before
Memorial Day, the traditional Sunday for clearing the slate as much as possible
in our home, which is haunted by its previous owner, a gentleman who, after he
retired from a career as a railway porter, embarked on a life of yard-saling
and became, as Marshall notes, “the Noah of knickknacks,” only getting like 14
of everything instead of only two. Marsh bought the house semi-furnished, which
is a euphemism for full of the stuff Mr. Russell, God rest his soul, didn’t
feel like moving. That several of the ceramic yard owls persist and that we
only got rid of the Electric Belt Exerciser last summer is testament to Mr.
Russell’s shade still persisting here on North Kerby Ave.; I think he’ll still
be here in spirit as long as we have his orange faux-leather bar and the
dismantled pool table and the stacks of weathered 45 RPM records that were
apparently sometimes used as drink coasters in the basement where he once ran a
private after-hours club.
We have a complicated
relationship with the Mr. Russell aesthetic: We’re both clutter people by
nature, prone to saving unmated socks for theoretical future art or cleaning
projects that never materialize and baby clothes because we remember Ramona
wearing them, and random other things simply because they have always been
there. It’s difficult to take things away because they are part of the portrait
of our home that we recognize.
We live in a midden
heap. An online dictionary defines this, one of my favorite terms, as: “a
refuse heap; specifically : a mound marking the site of a primitive human
habitation.” A site on archaeology advises that archaeologists love midden
heaps because “they contain the broken remains from all kinds of cultural
behaviors.” Should the world end tomorrow, we would be much beloved by any
alien researchers that might zip by our fair planet; we’ve perfectly preserved
a slice of American life in North Portland, layered like sedimentary rock — the
70s in the basement and the early 21st century further upstairs; those
theoretical future aliens might reach erroneous conclusions based on my vintage
typewriter collection being located in the dining room above the good dishes,
but I’ll leave it them to sort out whether the old Underwood Noiseless was used
to prepare some kind of ritual feast.
All of which is to say that we, and Marshall particularly,
have begun to seriously wonder about whether we should be giving Ramona a more
orderly environment, modeling sanity over chaos, etc.: a home space that’s more
intentionally curated and less random, and we have gotten a start. The dump run
Sunday included about a million lawn signs from elections past that were
moldering beside the house, metal trellises that had grown to resemble medieval
torture devices (Hey aliens! What would you have made of those?), and a
sizeable load of too-small kid clothes to neighbors and Goodwill. We also
brought in good dirt and planted this year’s tomatoes and peppers where weeds
were holding court and trashed the hand-me-down wicker chairs on the front
porch that probably didn’t merit handing down and struggled briefly over what
to do with the iron and canvas wing-back chair I’ve been carting around since
college, which had deteriorated to the point of dumping my friend David on his
tail when he sat in it at a book club meeting last summer.
You would think, given my merciless attitude toward
Marshall’s beloved rake, that I’d have let go of the wing-back more easily, but
no: It was my turn to be recalcitrant. And I couldn’t even explain why I wanted
to keep it except that I owned it and I had since before I even moved west from
Michigan. I’m not very good at letting go, and this is one of those places
where my mate and I line up a little too well — there’s no adult in our house
who is, and if Ramona’s insistence on keeping the empty Kleenex box I tried to
recycle from the bathroom is any indication, we’ve spawned another pack rat.
And yet — not only
archaeologists love a midden heap; alchemists did too — so do you, if you
compost. There’s something lovely about the way that what we no longer need,
amassed, can generate something new — fertilizer, in the case of compost, maybe
creativity in other instances. It was Ramona who pointed out, as I was, with
some resignation, carefully folding the canvas seat of my old chair to consign
it to oblivion, that the metal frame looked like a tomato cage. And so it did.
While Marshall and
the packed truck rumbled away, Ramona and I fitted the chair frame over a newly
planted Purple Cherokee start and patted dirt around the base. It looks a
little weird, but it’s going to work, I think, and it has the advantage of
having been free. We’re also talking about dusting off Mr. Russell’s bar
downstairs and bringing back the after-hours club as a kid hangout — Ramona
could benefit from exposure to the great hits of decades gone by in that record
collection. We will never live in elegant minimalism, I’m pretty sure. But
trying for balance will get us somewhere closer, perhaps — and I think I’m OK
with Ramona growing up among a certain number of things that are waiting to
become other things, a certain number of gentle ghosts.
Melissa Favara teaches English in Vancouver and lives and
writes in North Portland, where she parents Ramona, age 6, hosts a bi-monthly
reading series, and counts her husband and her city as the two great loves of
her life.
This article appears in 2013-05-24.