Liz

It's gone on for four long weeks now. The boys used to like coming home from school. They would throw open the back door, drop their backpacks on the floor and head straight to the pantry for first dibs on snacks. Now they kick around outside in the driveway and in the backyard with the dogs until they can't hold out any longer and come inside what used to be our comfy home. Over the last month it's turned into a dusty and disarrayed house full of cardboard boxes, piles of things and paint smell. Various people come and go beginning early in the morning and just today I answered the door in a short, purple, sleeveless nightgown and no bra with my hair a bird's nest piled high on top of my head. I was a sight but the polite painters showed no fear, averted their eyes a little but otherwise acted just like they always do and immediately got to work.

The realtor says that the competition to our 40 year-old house are new builds so we need everything to look perfect. All bed linens must be white. All towels and shower curtains must be white. All the walls in the whole entire house must be one color, basically white with a tinge of gray. She has pointed out all kinds of small things that I never noticed before, like a little corner piece of the brick around a flower bed that is missing. It's close to the front door and there's never a second chance to make a first impression! We have had to remove half of the furniture and all the art on the walls so now there are only a few framed mirrors are still hanging. No family photos out anywhere. The idea is to allow the potential buyers to imagine themselves living in the space. All the cabinets, closets and drawers are freshly painted and empty. We are going for the "no one lives here" look which is extremely challenging to actually live in for anyone but near impossible with four sons and three dogs who shed. I'm really hoping there are just a couple of quick showings and then a solid offer so we won't have to keep up the whiteness and get to have clothes in our closets again.

Something cool did happen today. In the midst of clearing out old dusty boxes from the very back of my closet I discovered a real treasure I never knew I had all these years. It was the box where my mother had kept all of her special and sentimental things like cards and letters she had received from friends and family over the years. Her old passports and the divorce decree from our dad was in there too, along with me and my brother's vaccinations and other documents from childhood. There were also blank greeting cards with sentiments she thought were funny but hadn't had a chance to write. Those are the best because she had a wicked sense of humor. I have a few boxes of my own special things in my closet and when I sift through the contents, which is not often, I get nostalgic and realize how good our life has been and how much we have lived. I'm also reminded that I have more years behind me than I do in front which makes me technically "older" I suppose but I'm still way too young to be old.

My mom passed away in 1999, the same year Rafa and I were married. Her name was Liz and she would have been one of those fun, eccentric grandmas who rode around on her white Honda scooter wearing her fun purple motorcycle boots with her purse bungee corded down on the back end of the seat and wearing no helmet because she liked feeling the wind on her face and through her hair. (All of this is absolutely true by the way.) Mom would have told imaginative yet slightly disturbing tales to her grandchildren. This was a real talent she had. Her stories were full of colorful characters that usually had one outstanding or odd trait. I remember this one character named Pat who showed up in her stories pretty regularly. Pat was an old man who had a stroke that left the right side of his fallen and droopy. He had robust red cheeks that were so heavy it pulled the skin down underneath his eye. The old man's eyeball looked like it was bulging right out of his face. It was already difficult to understand him when he spoke but when he got to drinking no one could understand a word he said. Sometimes he would gulp Jameson whisky and sing old Irish pub songs but no one sang along because nobody could understand his drunken Irish slurs! I once saw a photo of Mom's grandfather Patrick and realized he was the inspiration for the droopy faced drunken character in her weird stories and his eye was red and bulging out! I later heard he was a mean drunk who scared the hell out of the grandkids. Mom's stories were never dull. This is why discovering her special box was like stumbling across a collection of the rarest of gold coins. It was full of short stories she had written. Some were handwritten on loose leaf paper, some written in spiral bound notebooks with doodles in the margins and some were typed on a real old-fashioned typewriter. I have not had time to read any of them since I'm busy making my house white and empty, but scanning the pages I can see that some of the dates go back to the late 70's when she would have been about 25 years-old. I can't wait to dive in.

3/7/25

M.S.