It has started/You may have already won!

One month and you will not be able to recognize all of this.

    Wallpaper curling down from the ceiling, moist and rotten, the pattern mush.   Once, hopeful voices filled this room, tools swinging from hand and belt.

   The lemonade waiting nearby in a tall glass pitcher, sweat beading up along it's flanks on this summer day, making it hard to hold, making the handle more useful than usual.

   Happy voices mingling with laughs and playful chiding.   Up goes the wallpaper.   Mother's choice.

   See the bathtub.   See the chain leading down to the rubber stopper.  See the big brown stain along the porcelain under the faucet.  Roll up your sleeves.   Hold your breath.  Set your jaw in it's place of determination.   Go to work.

   Smells surround you, mildew and mold.   Burning chemical sour.   But underneath this, something else.   A ghost of her smell, something hidden in the porous surfaces that is reluctant to give up and go away.    Repetition leads to comfort.  Comfort leads to inertia, momentum.    Resistance.    One-two, one-two.

   Bring your can.    Everything you remove will leave something behind, as everything else that was left behind before you got here.     You are better off leaving something here on purpose.   You think you understand this distinction, but you do not.  This is the riddle you are not even aware of yet.    Bring your can.   Fill it.  When do you know you are finished?   Will you have to be told, or do you know instinctively?

   One month after another, but this one a little different than the others.     Hands become claws.

 

July 4th

  I knew I was asking for trouble walking barefoot across the yard like that.   If the broken glass and sharp little beer car pull-tabs didn't get me, I knew there were parasitical larvae in some suspended state of development just waiting to find a way into a good healthy digestive tract like mine, even if it meant exploiting a weak spot in the soles of my feet in order to get in.   I am ashamed to admit it, but there were many such chinks in my armor.   The summer had just begun, and I was not in the practice of walking about with no shoes or socks on, like some ocher primitive.    I am a proud member of MENSA.  I am better than that.

  So, where were my shoes?   If I was so smart I should know the answer to this fairly simple question.