My neighbors are about to move back into their house after it burned down over the fourth of July week. Actually, it was really only their attic that burned, but telling people that it “burned down” elicited expressions of such shock and horror that it has always been worth the slight exaggeration.
After the attic burned I watched the “property restoration” trucks pull up every morning to remove the contents of the entire house. It all got carted off to some magical place where the water damage was repaired and the odor of smoke was removed. I’m imagining it all got replaced with Febreez, Gentle Fresh Scent. If that’s the case I could have probably done it for them.
One morning was different, however. I looked out and a whole yard full of belongings was out on their lawn. A feeling of excitement ran through me. A yard sale? On a Monday? Sweet. But then I noticed a guy in a tie and suit pants walking through it all with a clipboard. Guys in ties are rare at garage sales, so I knew this was something different. The woman who lives in the burned house was trailing behind him. The contents of the yard were so hodge podge that it finally occurred to me that these were the actual contents of the attic that managed to survive the fire. There was a set of chairs so impossibly unattractive that they had to have been purchased before everyone started watching HGTV. A wicker basket. A black plywood cutout of a witch and a cat riding a broomstick. A couple of hideous lamps. And a bunch of other crap that was so dumb I instantly forgot what it was.
I started thinking about our own attic. It has a beautiful set of stairs that lead up to it which means I don’t have to crawl through a hole in the ceiling to put stuff in it. So I put A LOT of stuff up there. Sometimes I go up there and think, what is all this JUNK? I don’t need it. Yet I find myself unable to part with it.
I looked out at my neighbor again. She was smiling. Like cats who purr to reassure themselves when they are scared, Scandinavians have an unnerving habit of smiling when bad things are happening to them. I imagine our ancestors experiencing life-threatening events like the Plague, the Dust Bowl and grasshoppers destroying crops repeatedly and our Scandinavian relatives would be grinning through it all. I studied my neighbor’s face and realized that this was not a smile of fear. Rather, she was extraordinarily happy as her insurance agent was cataloging the items and a worker tossed them one by one into a dumpster. Yes, my neighbor was in the process of GETTING PAID for all that junk and SOMEONE ELSE was doing the labor of ridding her of it.
I seethed with envy. That was when I realized I had a problem on my hands.
I envisioned my grown children after my death, trudging up to the attic, pissed and annoyed and muttering under their breath, "What IS all this crap? Why did she save this shit? God DAMN her! " There’s one particular box I imagine them carrying down and one will say to the other, “Who is OJ Simpson anyway and why is he on all these magazines?”
One of my plans when I’m dead is to come back and haunt my house so I will wait until they are asleep that night utterly exhausted with the effort of it all (and based on my family’s luck they will have to do this in the middle of July when the attic temperature rises to a balmy 150 degrees) and I will float down to their lovely heads and whisper in their ears, “OJ was the guy they acquitted because the glove didn’t fitted.” My adult children will wake up confused and while eating their Lucky Charms that I never bought for them while I was alive, they will compare notes on a strange dream they had about their mother and what horrible grammar she had. It won’t occur to them to be shocked that they had the same dream because their minds will already be on the horrible job they have ahead of them - the emptying of the second half of the attic. My daughter’s despair will be greater the second day because she’ll get confirmation that there really is nothing in it she can make a dime from.
So yes, I have to get up there and clean it myself, but first there’s something else I need to do. I need to crawl into my neighbor’s dumpster and get that plywood witch. I know exactly where I can keep it until next Halloween.
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