For the last few days the weather has been bleak, gray, dismal and steamy. The air so full of moisture that the whole house is clammy to the touch. Yesterday I left the upstairs windows open just a crack, no more than an inch, so that the rain could not get in. When I arrived home at the end of the day I found that the walls and ceilings all the way out into the main hall were drenched, literally dripping with moisture. It looked as if the house was weeping.
I wiped it down with paper towels and closed all the windows and doors, which made the cats unhappy.
It's dark in there, too, and I can't seem to turn on enough lights to brighten the place. Damn these newfangled CFL lightbulbs anyway. In the commercials they claim to give off the same light as incandescent bulbs, but that is a bloody lie. When you switch on an incandescent bulb, you get instant clean white light. When you turn on a CFL bulb, you get swampland. A pale wan yellowish glimmer that takes forever to reach its full strength, and retains a yellowish cast even then.
When incandescent bulbs finally become illegal, I predict that we will have people jumping out of buildings like snowflakes.
In case you couldn't tell: On Sunday a mood descended on me that I have not been able to shake since, and weather like this is no help. Is it possible to build up an immunity to Prozac? Or can the drug just not cope with the added load of winter depression?
As they will not be used in evidence, I put the stolen items that I recovered back out into the house. I thought this would cheer me up. It didn't. It will all be gone, soon, anyway.
I started to do some writing for this blog, but words failed me. In trying to find something to say I want back through the emails I'd written in the weeks following my mother's death. This was a huge mistake.
I am not, in the vernacular, "dealing effectively with my feelings." Or anything else, really. It's tough to care when you know that a pack of strangers are going to come into your house and take your whole life apart.
Doug, it will get easier, as long as you don't drown your sorrows. I agree with Wendy. Stuff is stuff. You will keep some things that are meaningful and as for the rest, they will become part of your memories.
ReplyDeletekaelimcc: As they sometimes say on GEORGE OF THE JUNGLE (cartoon series, not the movie): "You said it, b'wana!" No one takes away the memories, and it's a gift to be able to make exciting _new_ memories -- if one accepts the gift.
ReplyDeleteI hope that my commenting at this late date doesn't bring you back to a place that you would rather be left to memory, still, I am compelled to write something here.
ReplyDeleteWhen I moved from my Albion house it took me months. A half a year at least, a car load, or a little trailer load at a time. Of course I took what I wanted and needed first, so as time went on the task had not an ounce of pleasure left in it and it had not been very pleasant from the start.
One day I went in to the house and the entire inside was wet. We had lived there for 11 years and this had not happened before. There were droplets on the ceiling waiting to fall. There were streaks on the walls where they had already fallen and puddles on the floor where they accumulated and it was this way in every room, upstairs and down. The water had been shut off so it wasn't a burst pipe, the roof wasn't leaking, it wasn't raining outside, I couldn't understand it.
I tried to dismiss the indoor rain by telling myself it was just because the house was not being occupied, but my parents house (also in Albion) is unoccupied for 6 months out of the year and me being the caretaker, inside myself I knew, that it is not common to have every indoor surface slick with water.
I wiped off the ceilings as best as I could and took another load of things to the new house and I didn't think about it much after that, not until I read your blog tonight. Now I know that my house was weeping too. Oddly, it seems such a simple explanation now.
Jaye