I have an old piano with an old decrepit bench.  The fabric had worn away and the children had picked at the deteriorating foam cushion and finally I had enough.

A few days ago I bought a slab of foam at Fred Meyer.

Today I bought a length of fabric at Value Village.

Tonight, I pried old staples and fabric from the wood.  I glued the foam on the board, then stapled on an old towel.  I topped that with the new fabric and then spent some time puzzling over the empty staple gun, retrieving more staples and then wondering why I couldn’t get the staples to discharge from the staple gun.  I did not curse or stab myself with a screwdriver or drive a staple into my eyeball.

Eventually, I prevailed.

I stapled the fabric on the board and finished the whole thing with the backing fabric.

So it looks better.

I also filled some half-filled paint cans with kitty litter so I can dispose of them.

I know!  You wish your life were this full of excitement!

The end.

I wondered this afternoon if I will ever do anything again besides pack and clean, sort and purge, organize and rearrange.

I also thought how strange it is to live in limbo.  I feel myself withdrawing emotionally from my community and I’m not sure what to do about that.  I have no energy to care very much about it because I’m too busy deciding what can be donated to Value Village and what needs to be packed into a box.

I did manage today to finally move the extra moving boxes into the storage room so my living room looks more like a living room and less like a U-Haul truck.

That makes up for yesterday which felt like one-hundred percent work and yielded paltry results.  I was at the soccer field at 8:20 a.m. and the streetlights were still on.  My daughter’s team lost badly.

We went home and I went straight back to bed which was kind of awesome.  My toes thawed by the time I got up again.  A family friend took my two youngest kids to a movie, so while they were gone I ran some errands.  When we were all home again, I had to leave to pick up my teenagers.

Anyway, so the weekend’s over.

I wish we could get an extra hour of sleep every night.

I feel so accomplished today.  Not only did I drop off a sturdy metal filing cabinet and a cheap wooden microwave stand at Value Village, but I also located a place willing to take my old dead computer and gigantic monitor.

I researched the issue online and found this particular computer shop that recycles old computers and monitors and had to laugh at the extremely geeky and young employees.  They were a sitcom stereotype of the kind of smart twentysomething nerds who understand the inner workings of computers.  And I do mean that in the nicest way possible.

Anyway, I was happy to fork over $17 to be rid of the electronics.  Some Facebook friends informed me that there are easier and free (!) ways to unburden yourself of dead computers and monitors, but who knew?  I didn’t find any other way while consulting Google.  I was very close to just tucking them into my trash can and covering them with kitchen garbage to fool the trashman, so I felt quite responsible disposing of them properly.

Then I managed a quick trip to Target before I returned home at noon to work.

I worked until five–with a quick interruption to drive the neighbor girl to her volleyball practice and to pick up my own daughter from school.  The rain began as I ventured out at 3:30 p.m.  Great.  Because that is exactly what we need for Saturday morning’s soccer game.

A little after five, I drove my teens to meet their friend and his mom.  They are spending the night at their friend’s house.   So it’s quiet and no one will be eating a snack at 2:00 a.m.

I’m living a life crammed full with tedium.

In seven hours and twelve minutes, I need to be showered and dressed for rain and ready to leave the house for Grace’s soccer game.  She has team pictures first and we have to arrive by 8:20 a.m., which is a crime, if you ask me.

But no one asked me.

I spent three hours tonight in my storage room puzzling over the random belongings that have been taking up space.

My task seems simple enough:  pack up what we’re keeping and gather what we’re giving away and get rid of it.

I have done this over and over again and every time I go back into the room, I am faced with more stuff.  I promise I am not a hoarder but I cannot give up my piano books or the framed pictures or my box of thread.  For one thing, I’ve been meaning (for years) to paint those frames black and hang up those pictures again.  And what if I get my sewing machine fixed and begin to sew again one day?  What if?

The back of my van is once again full of stuff to drop off at Value Village, including a lovely sturdy metal filing cabinet and a particle board microwave stand.  I found a place that will take an old dead computer and gigantic broken monitor.  Tomorrow morning I must resist the lure of my cozy bed and drop off all that stuff.

I hope that Saturday will be the day I triumph over the storage room.

However, I may not survive Saturday morning.  We have to arrive at the soccer field at 8:20 a.m. for team pictures before the 9 a.m. game.

That is just unkind.

You never know when you might feel an odd pang of regret.

You can be minding your own business when you suddenly realize how self-conscious and self-centered you were as a college student.  You wonder why you didn’t ask better questions and get to know a wider array of people when you had the chance.  Instead, you just worried that your hair was too frizzy and that your stomach was too fat and that no one would ever actually want to marry you.

You look around and see how few friends you’ve accumulated while settled on this patch of land and you realize you must have done something wrong, terribly, terribly wrong.  Are you still so cocooned in your own little world that you have failed to reach out to other people?  Do you repel people?  Do you smell?  What, exactly, could be wrong with you?  Is it your breath?

You reach a particular age and you realize that some doors have closed behind you.  In fact, they have clanged with the finality of prison bars, locking you out.  And even though you wanted to be where you are, you’re kind of bummed that you can’t retrace your steps and choose a different sort of life.  Why didn’t you become a nurse when you had the chance?  What stopped you from going to a better college?

You’re too old, too old, too old says the chant in your head.

You wonder about your dad and wish you’d known him as a person instead of as an obstacle to elude and an authority to avoid.  You were always so scared in a vague sort of undefined way.  What frightened you?  If only you’d been braver and spoken up when you had the chance.  If only you’d known how to ask better questions and been brave enough to hear the answers.

You remember the diary you kept were you in second grade.  It was a five-year diary, which is an impossible block of time to comprehend when you are eight.  You can’ t believe you burned it when you were eighteen, afraid that someone would laugh at the scrawled thoughts of your eight-year old self.  You were embarrassed about being childlike, even when you were a child.  You still cringe at reminders of your childhood actions.

You’re still scared but without good reason.  You’re still that eight year old girl underneath it all.  You still worry that no one will sit with you in the cafeteria.

You wish you were outward facing instead of inward focused.

That would change your perspective and your life.

You know it’s true.

And today I assembled two nightstands with nothing but my bare hands, a phillips head screwdriver, a set of incomprehensible directions and my wits.

Do you know how expensive nightstands are?  More expensive than you’d think.  The only nightstands I’ve owned have either been cardboard (true story) or thrift store castoffs.

For the past twelve years, four Rubbermaid tubs have served as master bedroom nightstands.  A stack of two deep tubs were just the right height . . . and sure, sometimes the lamps fell over because the plastic surface wasn’t exactly level.  Still.  This haphazard solution solved two problems:

1)  We had no nightstands.
2)  We had no suitable storage area for out of season (or out of size, who are we kidding?) clothing.

But enough.  It’s one thing to live with pretend furniture for twelve years, but it’s an entirely different thing to create a bedroom space that makes strangers walking through your house want to own that bedroom space.  (Please?  Don’t you want to own my house?)

So, I surfed over to Amazon, found suitable nightstands and bought two.

The boxes arrived this afternoon, so armed with my phillips screwdriver, I  began assembling.  The nightstand came in fifteen separate pieces.  And the kids complain you’ll never use geometry again after high school!

I only put two parts on backwards but no one will ever know if you don’t tell. So don’t tell.

And now, my bed is nestled between two actual nightstands.  Total cost?  $113.98.  Take that, Pottery Barn!

p.s.  Hey, wait!  Is that screwdriver a phillips head screwdriver?  Because that’s the picture that I found when I Googled “phillips head screwdriver” . . .

Signed,
Unfamiliar with correct terminology, apparently

p.p.s.  I thought I was right about the screwdriver . . . apparently I’m smarter than Google.

Last night, one of my teenagers went to a friend’s house to watch movies.  My 12-year old went trick-or-treating with a gang of his friends (supervised by one of the other moms).  My other teenager stayed home to pass out candy.

And I took my 8-year old daughter-dressed-as-a-bumblebee trick-or-treating.

We went with her best buddy from down the street and his parents . . . and as the kids raced up each sidewalk to ring the doorbell, I remembered the first time we trick-0r-treated in our neighborhood.

My teenagers were only five years old.  My 12-year old was a baby in a stroller.  I dressed the twins in costumes I made myself: a cowboy (with a horse made from a cardboard box) and an Indian.  I used to be crafty and creative, you know.  I dressed baby Zach as a cowboy, too, with a neckerchief and a cowboy hat.

My sister brought her little ones and we walked the streets just as dusk fell.

The boys and their four-year old cousin fought over who got to ring the doorbell at each house.

We barely made it around the circle before they were complaining that their buckets were too heavy and their feet hurt.

And there I was last night, escorting my trick-or-treater, my unexpected daughter, a child I hadn’t even dreamed of twelve years ago.  Same me, same street, entirely different child.

I reminded myself that this was the last time we’d trick-or-treat in our neighborhood.

Who knew trick-or-treating would feel so much like saying goodbye in so many ways?

Another week sped by.  Tomorrow my son heads off to a football game but I won’t be able to attend it since I’ll be at soccer with my daughter.  She has only three games left in the season.  (And all the parents rejoice!)

My husband’s been in California for three weeks now and it’s just the weirdest thing ever to be separated from him.  We’ve never been apart this long in the twenty-three years we’ve been married.  At least I am extremely busy.  Less time for introverted wallowing.  This weekend I intend to get the items in the storage room completely packed up or given away.

A day or two ago, I heard the noise of motors in the front of my house, so I went to the living room window to investigate.  It turned out that a crew was working on my neighbor’s lawn across the street.  As I stood there, a little distracted, I happened to look down at the boxwood hedge outside.

A bird lay on its side.  If I didn’t know better, I would have thought that it simply stopped, fell over sideways and slept, but of course, it was dead.

I saw a smear of feathers on the window.

Poor bird dove head first into my picture window and died.

I would sum this up with a moral about the fragility of life, but that’s not really how the story went.  The story went like this:

Oh no.  How sad.  Poor bird.

I should dispose of that.

Huh.  I wish my husband would dispose of that.

How long has that dead bird been there anyway?

I have to take care of that myself.  If only it weren’t raining.

And I have slippers on.

I better get back to work.

Maybe no one will notice.

Hey, wait.  Do raccoons eat dead birds?

I should move that dead bird before my daughter sees it.

Hey, wait, that would be a good lesson about death in a very detached way.  We didn’t know the bird’s name, after all.

Okay, I’m pretending I didn’t see the dead bird.

Back to work.

When I returned tonight from driving my son to football practice, my daughter informed me that there was a dead bird outside.  “Adam used a tissue and threw it away,” she told me.

Well.  And that was that.

See what happens when you just pretend you didn’t see something?  Someone else takes care of things!

Lesson learned.

At dusk, I left my daughter in the care of her grandma at the soccer field and headed back home to pick up two of my other kids.  I turned off by the library.  As I passed the bus stop, I noticed a boy standing near a boy on the ground.  The boy on the ground was curled over his knees, forehead on the ground, apparently crying.

As I drove by, I wondered what had happened to the crying boy.  Had he fallen?  The other boy just stood there.  After I passed, I glanced in my rear-view mirror and that’s when I saw the standing boy begin to kick the boy on the ground.

I knew in a flash that the standing boy had been waiting for cars to pass so he could resume kicking the boy on the ground.

I was outraged.

I turned into an apartment parking lot and drove back to the bus stop.  I pulled my car over next to the boys and rolled down my window.

“What is going on here?” I demanded.

Both boys were standing now and just looked at me.

I pulled my car keys out and marched around my van to stand between the boys.

“What are you doing?” I said again to the bigger boy.  He appeared to be about ten years old.  He stood mute.

“I saw you kick him.  That is not cool!  You do not kick other people!”

The younger boy–probably five years old–stood on the other side of me.  He stared with wide eyes.  His cheeks were blotchy from crying.

“You!”  I pointed to him.  “You go home!”  He immediately started running toward the apartment complex behind the bus stop.

I turned back to the kicking boy.  “What is wrong with you?  You do not kick people!”

Finally, he spoke.  “He’s not even supposed to be out here!  And my mom isn’t home!”

“Is he your brother?”

“No, he’s my cousin.”

“You don’t KICK him!  That is not all right.”

“We, he threw a shoe at me.”

I rolled my eyes.  “Are you kidding me?  And you kicked him?  It’s not okay to kick people!”

He began to move away from me.  As he reached the parking lot, I yelled, “Do not kick people!  If the police were here, you’d be in big trouble!”

By that time he was running toward the apartments where his young cousin had disappeared.

I realized with a horrible jolt that I had perhaps just made things worse.  Now the smaller cousin would be in the apartment, in private, with his cousin who had been viciously kicking him.

I ran for my van and wheeled into the parking lot but it was too late.  The boys had both disappeared.

And I am left to wonder.  Did I do the right thing?

I’m having a bad week.  I have PMS.  I gave up Diet Coke.  My mild cold is turning into a horrible cold.  It’s half-days of school.  My house fell into disarray somehow.  If I turn my back for one second, everything springs from its rightful home and throws itself to the floor.

I mean, how else can you explain the clutter on the floor throughout my living room, kitchen and family rooms?  I do not throw things on the floor myself, so it’s mystifying.  Well, it would be mystifying except that I know the kids are to blame.  For instance, this afternoon my bored 8-year old daughter resorted to running laps through the living room and kitchen . . . she propped the Costco-sized package of paper towels in the doorway so she could hurdle them.

So, that explains eight paper towel rolls scattered everywhere.

I am to blame for the enormous containers of food on the counters and kitchen table.  I didn’t have time to put the Costco food away after returning home today.  It would never occur to the kids to put anything away.  I have failed as a mother.

I can’t believe how much continual effort it takes to keep the tide that is my children from continually depositing debris everywhere upon the shore that is my house.  I need a clone of myself who can devote herself to being a housekeeper since I clearly am overwhelmed.

And with that, I’m gathering up the pile of snotty tissues by my keyboard and throwing them in the full trashcan and going to bed.

Tomorrow is another day.  I hope.