The excitement was palpable but so was the frustration as I stood there in jeans and a t-shirt noticing the open attic of my new home. It was not the typical attic all tucked away where no one could see it but more like one of those high ceiling ledges. It ran completely across the top of one wall of this much larger than normal living room.
It was a shade of green that I was going to change as soon as I cleared all the piles of stuff. It was so full of stuff, it almost reached the ceiling which was already extremely high. What on earth am I going to do with all that stuff? I had just moved in and was excited to make this new home my own. Looking up from the lower part of the room, some of the stuff looked like it could be valuable. Why would anyone leave it behind?
It looked like a mixture of valuables, memories, and trash. Even from the lower level I could see crumpled up pieces of paper, candy wrappers and what seemed to be photo albums sticking out of the piles. I also couldn’t understand why the previous tenant would pile it all in a place that was so clearly visible to anyone who came into the house. Why not pack it away in the garage or someplace less obvious?
I saw an unstable ladder that was painted white with smooth cylinder rungs. This rickety old ladder, on the left side, was the only way to reach the top of the wall. I decided, now is as good a time as any to start cleaning. I thought it best to first get up there and see what kind of cleaning supplies I might need. Tying a bandana over my long brown hair, I climbed the ladder one rung at a time going slow enough to judge how each held my weight.
Every rung I stepped on was awkward and exhilarating at the same time. I felt revitalized as I thought about how cleaning this area was going to beautify my living space but also concerned about getting rid of someone else’s treasures. I contemplated about when it was finally clean, it would accent the room and enhance the experience of my new home. I got excited thinking of the results.
Once I got to the top, many of the piles looked like trash. This is going to be easier than I thought. It all seemed to be thrown up here with no apparent rhyme or reason. The more I throw away, the less junk I will have to figure out what to do with. At first glance it seemed like a no brainer. But the more I examined the piles of piles, the more I saw valuables.
There was a tall metal lamp that might be useful next to my couch. There were lots of piles of bed sheets and linens. And a guitar that was only a little banged up. Melody might be able to use that. She has been wanting to learn guitar. I also saw photo albums strewn throughout and began pulling things out that were clearly trash items thinking that once the trash was out of the way, it would make clearing the useful items easier. I started focusing on the trash items.
I noticed a lot of food. There was an old half eaten hamburger from McDonald’s next to a box with a few fries left. There were Twixt wrappers everywhere and lots and lots of sugary food items. I found a large plastic trash bag and started stuffing it. This is about the time I started seeing the roaches.
There were so many of them but they were all so incredibly tiny. I began being concerned about moving things for fear of unearthing large quantities of larger ones but that didn’t seem to be happening. There seemed to be only a couple hundred baby ones. I was surprised there weren’t more.
Then I saw one large one. I noticed him specifically because it felt creepy how he seemed to follow me as I cleaned. As I was separating between what was trash and what was not, he moved with me. He stopped when I stopped and moved when I moved. My first inclination was to kill him before he made any more babies but I got the sense that he was simply making sure I was ok. I have no understanding as to how I knew this, it just felt like he was watching out for me.
I decided I would try to ignore him as best I could and try not to get too squeamish about him. He stayed a fairly safe distance, at least safe for my comfort level and so I kept working, continuing to bag only the things that were obviously trash items.
Once getting that accomplished I started separating the items that were useful from items that I wanted to go through later with more purposeful intention. There were so many linens, I don’t need that many bed sheets but it will be helpful not to have to buy new ones for my new house. How convenient! I’ve never been afraid to reuse undamaged items. I will definitely have to put these through the washer before I use them.
I found more lamps as well but the tall one was the only one that seemed useful so the rest would go to the Salvation Army. I also found a couple of old rotary telephones but despite the nostalgic significance attached to them, they were now outdated so, off they would go as well.
As I continued to clean, I began finding some old toys strewn throughout the whole mess that brought back lots of memories. I recognized them as similar to ones I had owned when I was a kid. The amount of familiar items began to feel a bit odd. There was a small telephone that a child would drag along the floor with a string which would make the eyes move up and down. I found old wooden Tinkertoys and wooden Lincoln Logs and started building with them, for nostalgic purposes, of course.
A red package caught my eye and I recognized it as a package from a Sea Monkeys kit like the one I had tried, but failed to grow. There were ten or more packs of jacks with balls of varying sizes. Some of the balls were hard and cracking and would no longer bounce when I dropped them.
I separated out decks and decks of playing cards which began piling up and I lost count of how many there were. It brought back memories of when I would visit my grandparents and they would play bridge with their friends. I would watch my grandfather shuffle the decks by splitting the deck into two parts holding one part in each hand between his thumb and middle fingers. He would then place his middle fingers on the table close enough together so, as each thumb released a card at a time, they would cross in the middle between his hands.
He would then pick up the deck with his fingers, hold his thumbs to keep the cards from scattering and create an upward bridge that would force the cards together. I was fascinated watching him do this and determined to learn how to do it myself. My hands were too small at that time but I kept trying and eventually I learned.
My new attic was only halfway clean when I started to notice many pictures scattered throughout every pile. I had seen the photo albums but not paid too close attention to them. I picked up one of the pictures and my heart skipped a beat. It was a picture of me as a baby.
I was about one year old, dressed for winter. Sitting in a box with the word AJAX across the front. The box was in the snow in the front yard of my Nana’s house in Nassau, NY. I frantically looked around for some of the other loose pictures and found one of my grandparents when they were first married. I found one of my mother as a baby, sitting on a porch with her mother, grandmother and their Great Dane dog. I even found one from when my current husband and I visited his Aunt before we were married. I was two months pregnant with my second daughter.
I carelessly grabbed picture after picture finding all of them to be from MY life. My heart started racing and it even felt hard to breathe. I was confused. Why were these pictures here and why did this stranger have them? I wanted to understand but my head was reeling and I couldn’t think clearly. I sat down not even caring if I sat on a cockroach or not.
I don’t know how long I sat there before I could breathe again but it had to be more than twenty minutes. When I got my breath back I slowly climbed back down the ladder and sat down on my off green couch. I looked over at the side table and noticed a glass of water sitting there and drank it feeling grateful I had thought to put it there before. Wait, when did I do that?
I actually dozed while I processed what I had seen. When I came to, I noticed the tall lamp was placed next to my couch and wondered when I had put it there because I didn't remember doing that either. I looked up at the messy attic and pursed my lips in determination to finish cleaning it no matter what I found.
When I climbed the ladder again I noticed that it didn’t seem as dilapidated as it had previously. I must not have looked at it closely enough before. Once at the top I began cleaning again but this time I made a pile of pictures and albums until I could find a box in which to keep them. I was still confused about the content of pictures but decided to clean the rest of the attic before tackling that dilemma.
As I dug through the other random items, I began to notice that they were as familiar to me as the toys. I found a top and skirt that I had made as a teenager. It was my first sewing attempt and was the result of a class I took to learn how to use my mom’s old sewing machine. It would be the only sewing class I would ever take but the dress had fit perfectly. So perfectly, in fact, that it didn’t fit three months later as I was still a growing teenager at the time.
I found a book about horses. It had been a gift from my parents for Christmas. I had snuck into my mom’s room to find the presents she had hidden in her closet and saw it on the floor. Instead of digging through them, I just took a quick peek and saw, “The Lobe of Horses” as the title. I spent the next couple of weeks wondering, What the heck is a lobe of horses exactly? On Christmas day I read it more clearly, “The Love of Horses” but the lettering was so fancy that as I glanced at it in her closet, the v had looked like a b. I never looked for hidden presents before Christmas again.
I kept cleaning that attic for many hours, pondering the meaning of the pictures and other familiar items when I felt recognition hit me like a light bulb turned on after being in a completely black room. The light was too bright but there was no way to turn it down. If this recognition had been a literal switch, it would have broken simply by turning it on. I would no longer be able to turn it off. I had no choice but to allow myself to acclimate to the more intense light.
This was my attic! This was my stuff. This was my life and I was the previous tenant who had thoughtlessly piled my trash, my memories, my treasures where everyone could see and judge. It was my mess and I was the only one who could straighten it up.
Then I woke up from my dream.
