Heather and I flew to Vancouver last Saturday and Barry picked us up ( A TAD LATE). We went directly to the Delta house (Mum and Dad's old house) and began to face the mess. We started with the garage.
We swept out spider webs and wasp bodies and some other unidentified corpses and started to shift the junk. We had moved a book case to the garage and began to set it up as a display for a garage sale. At the beginning we were quite liberal and anything we thought had even the smallest value went on the shelves. Towards the end of the day we had dug about 5 garbage bags of, for lack of a better word 'crap', that Mum had squirreled away and saved.
The book case quickly filled up and then we became very choosy. We binned more junk and the little old storage shed is filling up fast
Professional packers had been hired by the disaster rescue crew to store all of Mum and Dad's belongings until they could be placed back into the house. They didn't know at the time how glad we were that we had found a way for us to get the old folks out of the house and into an independent living arrangement. They were never going to move back in.
The garbage bags piled up...we soon had an unwieldy pile of 15 or so bags.
We were exhausted and went back to Barry's house to cook our dinner and collapse on the couch.
It rained and rained and rained and we blissfully slept like logs. First thing on Sunday morning we were up and off down the freeway back to the house in the rain. The garbage we had left in the driveway was soaked and heavy and had not shrunk overnight.
The days dragged on, one room after another we excavated a life time of stuff, squirrelled away into secret cupboards and boxes and bags and corners. We dragged, carried, shifted the stuff to the garage and slowly we assembled a thrift shop, junk store estate sale jumble sale garage sale out of 66 years of accumulated unnecessary stuff.
It was as if they were saving it for another life time. In the next life they will have lots of luggage straps and if the opportunity arises they have a chinese calculator ( the numbers are in chinese characters), they will be able to add up all of the dead razors and electrical cords.
As their bodies changed size the clothes that were no longer able to be worn were stored away. Not given away, who knows our parents might get younger and will once again be able to wear the hiking boots and north sea fisherman's coats.
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