Blog Posts

Cleaning Out the Old, Day 13 - A Whole Lotta Death

2/26/2025

During the lockdown part of the pandemic, a lot of things happened simultaneously:

Dave and I started thinking seriously about death and dying. We had our wills updated.
Our bank branch closed, and we had to buy a fireproof house safe and clean out our safety deposit boxes.
I started agitating for a place to lay our heads after death. What if one of us died during COVID? This became more urgent as the whole world faced the possibility of death. Dave was fine being thrown in the ocean. I was not. So rather than spend eternity up in New York where the family plot is, we bought plots in the green cemetery at Monastery of the Holy Spirit, not far from our home.
I started cleaning, slowly, in multiple places over that year.

I read Marie Kondo again, and, she had a television show on cable for a while about her “sparks joy” cleaning method which was slightly less draconian than the book. Turns out she’d had a kid and life got messy, as it always does. I never could advocate throwing all my clothes in the middle of the floor, but I did pile folded clothes from a dresser and then later, hung clothes from a closet on the bed and neatly go through them. Books did get thrown on the floor and it was great. The one lasting thing I learned is how to fold laundry and put it in drawers so you can see everything you have. My drawers all close now. I have less because I can only have what fits in each drawer.

More effective for me was the show “Swedish Death Cleaning,” which if you haven’t watched it or read their materials, I strongly advocate. The idea of doing it so your loved ones don’t have to so resonates with me. They break it down so easily and carefully and involve lots of people who are on board. It’s lovely and is applicable to many forms of considering death. It’s the “Queer Eye” of Death – bring tissues.

Turns out a whole lot of thinking about death lead to a rebirth, as well.

It’s been 10 years since we renovated. I’m redecorating small places that make me happy. Dave says I’m “nesting.” It feels like the next logical part of this new beginning as I move into retirement.

I continue to let go of work, of board committees, of responsibilities. It’s good to be ready for the next chapter in my heart and in my home.

Cleaning out the Old, Day 12 - Formation

2/26/2025

High school friends and I visiting during college in my parent's house. The chair we are all resting on, Grandmother's painting on the wall and the piano all ended up with me.

In my parent’s home, I was conceived.
After birth, I was cared for, loved beyond measure. That, I never doubted.

Who I became, what I valued, my ethical code, the way “life worked” – all of these things I learned at my mother’s knee. Directly, yes, sometimes. Indirectly, perhaps even more.

My family kept things. We reused many things. My mother never had a scrap of fabric or yarn that she didn’t keep for a craft project, or the quilt she was going to make someday. We kept bread twist ties and rubber bands. Paper grocery bags. Frugality reigned in our home; it needed to.

From birth to age 22, when I left that home for good, I learned to save all the things. Letters, school projects, embroidery yarn, whatever. Mementos from childhood. Vinyl record albums, that traveled back and forth to college with me.

As a young person on my own, I acquired what I needed to live in a small apartment. It wasn’t much – my first sleeper sofa I came to hate. A coffee table that now lives in Anne’s house. Lots of hand me down furniture made up the rest.

At 25, I got married. It was an idyllic time, looking back on it all. It crashed to an end soon afterward, when I was 27. From then on, I had to learn to clean out other people’s things.

First was my mother’s house, and I was so young and emotionally devasted that I let my grandmother take the lead and keep far more than she should have. We got rid of some things that my father wasn’t going to use. I furnished my kitchen from her gourmet baking tools and my house with Aunt Grace’s antiques.

I learned then to only take things I thought I would use. No knickknacks. No art other than my father’s mothers’ paintings. My own boxes from my closet. Pared down, but packed into the little house Ed and I bought a year later. I didn’t know how much my father had stuffed into the attic over the years until he sold that house upon remarriage, when we had to do it again.

When my grandmother died of a broken heart 7 years after my mother, I helped my grandfather pare down. We started by removing the plastic covers from the living room furniture that had driven us both nuts for years. There may have been a high five involved when we were finished.

From the sublime to the ridiculously packed cupboards and closets, we pared down a lot. My grandfather wanted to keep most of the things on display in the house, so I knew I’d face those again someday.

My grandfather survived another 15 years without her and, hid away a lot of things we thought we’d gotten rid of after my dad and I left.

In the middle of that was my divorce.

At 45 years old, just before my grandfather died, I’d finally moved into my own house as a single adult, with the things I wanted to take there. And no more. I knew what I had to face, one more time.

Lessons learned in a life of death cleaning for others:

Only keep things you will use. Throw out the scraps.
If you’re still acquiring at my age, you’ve got a problem.
If you haven’t worn it for a year, get rid of it by swapping it, selling it, donating it.
Move often. For a while it was once every five years. It helped me pare down every time.
Have a few items you value and are attached to. Let the rest go.
Loss sucks. Grief doesn't stop when you want it to. Try to keep your wits about you when death cleaning for someone else.
All of this is easier said than done.

Cleaning Out the Old, Day 11 - I am Gen Jones

2/24/2025

I consider myself part of Generation Jones. The Jonesers are a small subset of the baby boom - our dates run from 1954-1965, which puts our dates overlapping the official end of the Baby Boom and the start of Gen X. The term was coined by American cultural commentator Jonathan Pontell, who argues that the term refers to a full distinct generation born from 1954 to 1965.

Read these qualifications from a Wikipedia article and see what you think, if you’re born in that time span:

Members of Generation Jones were children and teens during Watergate, the oil crisis, and stagflation. Unlike "Leading-Edge Boomers", most of Generation Jones did not grow up with World War II veterans as parents, and, as they reached adulthood, there was no compulsory military service and no defining political cause, as opposition to United States involvement in the Vietnam War was for the older boomers. Much of their parents' generation was sandwiched between the Greatest Generation and the Baby Boomers. Also, by 1955, a majority of U.S. households had at least one television set, and so unlike Leading-Edge Boomers born from 1946 to 1953, many members of Generation Jones (trailing-edge boomers) have never lived in a world without television. Generation Jones were children during the sexual revolution of the 1960s and 1970s and were young adults when HIV/AIDS became a worldwide threat in the 1980s.

The name "Generation Jones" has several connotations, including a large anonymous generation, a "keeping up with the Joneses" competitiveness and the slang word "jones" or "jonesing", meaning a yearning or craving. Pontell suggests that Jonesers inherited an optimistic outlook as children in the 1960s but were then confronted with a different reality as they entered the workforce during Reaganomics and the shift from a manufacturing economy to a service economy, which ushered in a long period of mass unemployment. Mortgage interest rates increased to above 12 percent in the mid-eighties, making it virtually impossible to buy a house on a single income. De-industrialization arrived in full force in the mid-late 1970s and 1980s; wages would be stagnant for decades, and 401(k)s replaced pensions, leaving them with a certain abiding "jonesing" quality for the more prosperous days of the past.

Generation Jones is noted for coming of age after a huge swath of their older siblings in the earlier portion of the Baby Boomer population; thus, many note that there was a paucity of resources and privileges available to them that were seemingly abundant to older Boomers. Therefore, there is a certain level of bitterness and "jonesing" for the level of doting and affluence granted to older Boomers but denied to them.

Boom.

I found my place.

I have never felt like a baby boomer, nor was I a “latch-key” Gen Xer. For me, this definition sums it all up. We watched our older brothers and sisters get it all – sex, drugs and rock and roll with all the fun, and my generation had all the consequences – AIDS, illegalization of LSD, arrests for having small amounts of pot, and then, disco. Yes, we were bitter.
On television we were constantly bombarded with perfect families and with toys we all should own. We acquired because we were told to, day in day out, by the shining light on the wall that everyone watched together at the same time. Imagine that.

Our parents worked hard to feed this myth. They bought us what they could. The Vietnam war and, later, Watergate were our dinner companions. All in the Family grew to define many of our homes far better than the Brady Bunch ever did.

In high school, I remember feeling bitter, angry and confused when the officials made it much harder for us to enjoy what our older brothers and sisters had generous access to. After graduating college and grad school with my high-rate student loans (albeit nothing to today’s young people) I was both angry and terrified that I couldn’t get a job or find a place to live that I could afford. Back then it was practically a crime to move in with your parents after graduation. I was thrilled to find a low-paying job in a private school – at least I was working.

The desire for things, for acquiring, was baked into us as children. As parents, we did no differently. No wonder our homes are chock full. No wonder our children have become minimalists.

Learning about Generation Jones was what kicked off this whole desire to pare down my belongings. Watching my child and her generation furnish their homes sparsely, but with beautiful high-quality furniture choices from our parent’s mid-century homes has really influenced me to not want to screw that up.

My things leave with me or before me. I get to choose.

Cleaning Out the Old, Day 10 - From the Box

2/23/2025

In a worn envelope, a photo.
One I’ve not seen before.
It’s one of those mandatory holiday/birthday/everyone line up for a photo you all look so nice pictures.
Three generations of strong women in my grandparent’s yard.

First impression – happiness – it’s a photo of me with long hair!
Very few of those exist. Very few photos of that time exist.

My mother hated that hair. Couldn’t wait for me to cut it off again.

Look again –
Me - Gangly. Miserable. Nerdy. Withdrawn. 13.
I want to be anywhere but here.
Hair should be straight but of course that’s impossible.
Tired. I look tired.

My grandmother – Strong. Steely-eyed. In focus. 58.
Fifity-eight! That is not what 58 looks like today.
The executive’s wife. Living her role.

My mother - - really tired. Puffy. 38.
Her coat is too big. That never happens, she’s an expert tailor.

But wait – look again –
See that scarf around her neck? It’s hiding the radiation scars.
My mother had throat cancer. It was not good. She was very ill. That was all I knew.

See my grandmother? She’s propping us both up. Literally.
Willing us both forward. So strong. A Mack truck of strength.
No wonder her hair is snow white.

I remember now, she was living with us. Took charge. Fixed the dinners. Made my life a living hell.
My mother needed her. She was there.

Fierce.
She was fierce.

I understand it now.

I hated her then.

I sit with tears of understanding in my eyes.

Look again –
Why did my father keep this picture with him?
Why was it not in an album stored somewhere in my guest room, with all the rest?
It would have been in his desk, his dresser, somewhere private where even in his second marriage he could look at his “three girls.”

Perhaps having a photo of the time my mother made it through gave him hope.

Maybe he liked my long hair.

Cleaning Out the Old, Day 9 - The Unexpected Box

2/20/2025

It’s been 4+ years since I’ve spoken to my estranged, conservative Christian stepmother. We tried for 3 years after my father died to get along for his sake, helping her pick a senior place to move to and choose finishes in the being-built apartment. Ultimately, since I was going to hell for being an Episcopalian and Dave was damned for being Jewish, there was simply no way for the relationship to continue without my father as the glue. It broke down during the 2020 election cycle when she emailed my liberal spouse propaganda about a certain candidate literally being the second coming, and he very nicely drew a boundary. She cut us off entirely. We never knew if she managed to move as we were no longer allowed to speak to the representative at the senior development.

Out of the blue last month, a box arrived. Dave came in from outside, arms full of box, with a funny look on his face. “This is for you,” he said. The label, in her neat handwriting, was addressed only to me. He set it down on the bench in the foyer and we both stared at it. “It’s not a bomb, is it?” I joked. “No, it’s not ticking,” Dave said. After a minute, we both said, “I guess she’s finally moving.”

Pause for a moment to consider that I had just finished months of work cleaning out my ancestor’s stuff in my basement. I was done. Furthermore, I had once expected to be able to choose what of my father’s was coming home with me. Given the relationship, I had long ago let go of having any of his effects other than what he gave me before he passed away. Looking at the unopened box, I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.

What happened next was odd, as packages invariably move the onto kitchen counter, get opened with a knife, unpacked, and the box goes out to recycling. This box stayed on the foyer bench. I brought a knife over and cut the seal.

Sifting through on a first pass, I could see the box was full of my father’s mementos. Photos of my mother, of a life before my stepmother entered it. Photos I had never seen. My father’s wallet and his Navy Insignia pins. His name plate from work. A soldering iron I once expressed interest in having. His father’s pocket watch. No note. Just envelopes full of miscellaneous photos and stuff she didn’t know what to do with anymore. I burst into tears. Dave encouraged me to leave the box there until I was ready to look through it thoroughly. It sat for at least a week.

Then, shock and surprise being over, I sat down to really go through the box. In my father’s wallet, next to all his ID cards of various kinds, was this little card with a scripture from the book of John on it. Given what’s been happening since Inauguration Day, it felt like a sign from heaven. This was the man my father was at his core, before FOX news entered his life. I miss that Dad, very much.

Being a well-trained daughter, I wrote my stepmother a thank you note.

I apologize if I've offended anyone here by this writing. It's impossible for me to talk about this experience without revealing my political and religious beliefs. The conflict and crisis in my family would not exist without those differences between us. Please consider this a microcosm of what we are facing in the US and have mercy on us all. Thank you.

Cleaning Out the Old, Day 8 - My Turn

2/19/2025

During the long drive in the van I found myself coming to some kind of reckoning. How hypocritical was it of me to have spent so much time and energy on the items that had belonged to previous generations, without also considering my own contributions to the clutter in my home?

Who was going to clean my stuff out for me someday?
Who would decide if anything was important or not?
Is there anything of my own important enough to be kept and passed on?

On the one hand, I began to understand why my grandmother took me by the hand around her house, showing me things to keep.

On the other, I am determined to challenge my upbringing and not leave all of that for someone else to have to go through.

Since early August, I have gone through the storage spaces with a vengeance. I’ve cleaned closets, kitchen cabinets and a large shelf section in the mudroom. I’ve reorganized my sewing area. I’ve painted and redecorated as a reward. Boxes and bags of items have been donated to our local charity resale shop. Other things have been gifted to friends and family. I gave the bulk of my old folk-song book collection to the teacher who took my place this summer. (That also went in the van.)

The final frontier is my office. It may look neat on first glance – a little cluttered, perhaps, but don’t look in the corners behind the furniture. Filing cabinets are stuffed full of old professional papers from my music teaching career. Things I kept “in case I ever go back into the classroom;” songs and teaching ideas that seemed great 18 years ago but are significantly outdated today. Old workshop handouts. Old notes about the University program when we did things on paper.

I was talking to Dave about this the other day – this is my career, here. Is any of it important in the larger scheme of music education in the US? My song collection – 5 volumes, some of it handwritten, some of it re-analyzed to my own standards (which are now used in many Kodály programs in the US), well, that, probably. I can donate that to an archive somewhere when I’m ready. The George Mason University Kodály program incorporation papers I’ve already sent in electronic form to my successor – would she want the folder I created at the time? I need to ask. Workshop handouts I created? I only have a few that are not stored in my computer files at this point.

Workshop handouts from others, songs I picked up here and there – old national conference booklets – my inclination is to toss the entire file cabinet. On the other hand, are all those booklets in my professional organization archive? Is there anything missing that I might contribute? We’ve been running 50 years of conferences; I’ve probably attended 40 of them over the years.

So many tasks to add to my list - I look around and this stymies me, way more than anything in the basement. After all, who am I to judge my own importance, if indeed I have any? I’ve always been a background player, a worker – 7 times on the national board, never in an executive office (thankfully.) I’ve never published a book, although I’ve written for the journal. I’ve taught all over the country and worked side-by-side with several of the heroes and US founders of our methodology. I can tell you some stories. Sometimes I feel a bit like the Forrest Gump of Kodály teaching. Does any of that matter to anyone but me?

The difficulty of dealing with all of this makes me understand my grandmother a bit more. As the world has moved from physical items to those stored in the cloud, is it any less easy to part with ideas? Photos? Creations?

I see this as “my retirement job.” Which is a cute way of saying I’m putting it off. Since tomorrow is never promised, I need to rethink that idea.

My retirement "roast" from the faculty at the George Mason University Kodály program.

Cleaning Out the Old, Day 7 - On the Road to Letting Go

2/18/2025

Until the day came that she had to learn to ask for help, anyway.

I knew nothing about driving a transit van. I just knew it was more than big enough to fit all the furniture and boxes. In the month between the rental agreement and the day of the big drive, stories of transit van thefts – gangs of thieves who were going to Atlanta hotels and breaking into vans in their parking lots, emptying the contents while the owners slept – started filling my news feed.

I made arrangements to stay with my friend Bruce, about halfway between Atlanta and Baltimore. That solved the hotel parking problem. Still, I was worried about the whole trip.

The day I picked up the van was one of the hottest of the year. Walking around it with the young clerk, I pointed out to her that indeed, this van had been broken into. In multiple places. Doors missing interior locks. Crowbar marks obvious even to me. We stood dripping sweat in the parking lot. She shrugged. “It’s all we’ve got. It would be a week before I can get another one out here.” I reluctantly got behind the wheel after drawing circles and arrows all over that little van-shaped diagram on the paper.

Empty, that van bounced all over the road. I began to seriously question what I was going to do. Why didn’t I just call a company who would take this load up there for me in a moving truck? Why do I want to do it myself?
Dave and Chuck, our neighbor, were waiting in the driveway to load the van. When the last chair was tied down, we gathered in the air-conditioned house for some iced tea. Chuck asked, “You going to be ok driving that thing? It’s huge!” “At least it’s only one way,” I replied. Chuck left, Dave and I showered and went out for a nice dinner. Before we left, he took my photo to send to Anne.

In the morning the drive began. It was exhausting. Every gust of wind sent the van into shudders. The automatic shift clunked and felt like it was going to stall between 4th and 5th, so I kept the van in the right lane at about 55 mph, maximum. This was going to be a long day. By the end of the drive, the only thing keeping me going was knowing I didn’t have to be back in the van until I’d had a good night’s sleep.

I pulled into Bruce’s townhouse complex and parked across the street. Wow, that’s odd – I’m parking next to an identical van. Unbelievably, it belonged to Bruce. And we went out to dinner in that, his car being out of town with his wife. OMG. Back bouncing in a high seat again.

Over a large margarita I poured out my driving difficulties, and Bruce taught me the basics of van handling. What to do in the wind gusts. How to stay in lane without working so hard. How to get past the shift-clunk and get it up to speed. I bought him dinner.

Driving now significantly smoother, I had 8 road hours to think on day two. Normally I just call people to pass the time. No modern technology here. I put in my ear buds to call Dave and let him know I was on the road. Why hadn’t I thought of this the day before? Road noise vanished. I could think.

I was on my way to retire from my summer university teaching. There was still a lot to consider about letting go, giving my replacements the reins. Mostly, I worried that I would not step back far enough this summer. I wanted them to feel trusted and ready to go. I was teaching a class I had never taught before and I was unready and nervous. I didn’t want to leave on a bad note in any way. But oh, I was ready to leave and not have to do this drive another summer. If I hadn’t already been ready, the van would have taught me that lesson. I laughed.
I thought about the remaining shelves in the basement full of things. I realized I was not content even with this much gone. More was leaving when I got home in a month and I was fired up to do it.

The van and I slowly made friends. I got it up to 65 mph before I was mired in rush-hour traffic in Washington DC. I finally arrived at Anne’s for a week of unpacking and helping her move in. I even parallel parked that sucker on the busy city street.

“Mom! You’re here!” Anne greeted me with a smile and a huge hug. It was all worth it.

Cleaning Out the Old, Day 6 - The Dirty Work

2/17/2025

It never ceases to amaze me how many communication styles exist out there. Clear, straightforward. Sideways. To the point. Rambling. And on and on.

I think of myself as a clear communicator in writing.

In speaking, I recognize I’m not always as good at asking for exactly what I want. I qualify. “If you could, I’d appreciate it if you might…” Or “It would be nice if someone did X” when I mean you. Yes, you. Get the idea?

No, actually, they often don’t. Or they deliberately choose not to, like my spouse. He thinks he’s going to change my communication style. That would be nice. Unlikely, but nice.

Why is it always the most difficult to communicate clearly with the people we love? And what happens when we get caught in the middle between two of them?

Case in point - my daughter’s boxes in my basement.

When I moved south, Anne, my daughter, was going off to college. It was tacitly understood by all three of us that we would store the contents of her room she didn’t need in her dorm (or at her dad’s house). What was less clear was for how long. Dave assumed we’d have them here until she graduated in 4 years. Anne assumed we’d keep them indefinitely. I assumed we’d have them at least until she finished grad school. Of course, none of us had voiced any of those assumptions out loud in each other’s presence.

Four years went swiftly by. A month or two before graduating with her bachelor’s degree, Anne announced that she was moving to California with her boyfriend. I understood that this meant we’d have the boxes a while longer. It was at this point that Dave started quietly fuming. Remember that formerly clean basement?

A year and a half later, she returned to the east coast to go to grad school (for 3 more years.) “Now?” Dave asked, plaintively. “No.” we both said to him. It was left to me to explain that Anne said that putting her boxes in a small apartment would mean she couldn’t fit anything else there. Eye roll from Dave.

Every time Anne moved, it seemed she moved to apartments with smaller and smaller closets, less and less storage. She became someone indicative of her generation - buying secondhand items and letting them go each move to keep costs down. Owning very little other than clothing. Good on her.

This did not take care of the boxes. Or, for that matter, for the furniture we were also keeping for her. “Not now,” she’d say to me, every year, leaving it for me to tell Dave. Again.

This went on through contract jobs and even through her first apartment in Baltimore, where she told us she was going to put down roots. Dave’s patience was at an end. I couldn’t blame him. Mine was, too.

About a year ago Anne indicated that she was starting to look for a house. Things on my end were now rapidly coming to a head. I informed her that the end of free storage was near. I knew full well that Anne did not want “a bunch of junk,” which is likely what was in those boxes she’d hastily thrown things into seventeen years before. I also knew for my own sanity that those boxes needed to leave. I felt squeezed between a rock and a hard place. Even though I had no desire to open the boxes, I realized I’d save myself a lot of grief if I went through them first.

Lucky me.

Last spring, with Anne’s permission, I began opening everything on the last, untouched shelving unit. I had to make the tough decisions. I threw a lot out. I took photos of other things to inquire first whether I should throw them out. Some boxes were simply going to Baltimore. Her yearbooks from grades K - 12? Not my problem. Papers from elementary school we were both particularly proud of back then? She can scan them and discard. And so on.

Once the house was purchased, I started sending photos of the furniture. Some was items we were not using; some was previously claimed by Anne. Approvals were obtained for additional items. I started piling boxes and furniture in the middle of the basement floor. It was quite astonishing what needed to go. I worked on this daily for over a month.

The amassing pile in my dining room, ready to be loaded onto the van.

I came to realize that no matter what went to Baltimore, these three things were a given:

Dave would do the happy dance and pack the van for me.
Anne would be unhappy about the amount of boxes coming to her, even at less than half of what there were originally.
I’d be relieved that this chapter of being squeezed between the two of them was over.

I called the truck rental company and secured a transit van.

Cleaning Out the Old, Day 5 - The Start

2/17/2025

2020. The year of elastic. Elastic waists on pajama and yoga pants. Elastic time. What month is it? I have no idea. Time stretched and compressed like a rubber band. Did I ever get fully dressed? Who knows?

Here’s what I do remember:

I walked the boundary lines (and every passable inch) of our 5 acres of property until I understood it.
I foraged more mushrooms than we could eat and left them in paper bags on my neighbor’s front steps.
Ditto baking. I baked way too much and gave away most of it.

And then, there was the basement. If not then, when?

There are three 4-foot shelf sections. One section holds things that Dave and I have accumulated – bike and kayak accessories, Christmas items, unused rugs, a huge electric frying pan. The other 2 were the great unknown. I came up with the idea that I would go through a box a week. Nothing huge, not a lot of pressure. Just start.

Being 15 years removed from bringing those boxes here meant that a lot of the emotion that was held inside them had dissipated. Like gas. Like germs that floated away on the breeze of being more than 6 feet away from someone. I could do this, now.

There was an entire 4-foot shelf section of things that belonged to my grandparents, my parents or childhood me that I managed to label and clear out a lot of. Photo albums – if they were vacation memories and I didn’t know the people in them, gone. My grandfather’s manual typewriter – still there but probably leaving soon. Looking for a collector. Old jewelry that wasn’t worth anything - out. Household items I would never use – gone.

My own boxes from my parent’s house – childhood toys from the attic. An entire suitcase of Barbie dolls and clothes. Toy dishes. I’m still looking for a collector who might want all or some of these. Today, in 2025, I’m seriously considering opening an Etsy account to get it all sold.

What I succeeded in doing most was clearing out the items that weren’t valuable, or that didn’t mean anything to me. And then, I labeled boxes a lot more carefully. Mostly, I ended up creating a to-do list. It’s still waiting to be done.

Get the slides and movies and VCR movies converted to cloud storage. (When that gets accomplished, I clear up 2 shelves worth of space.)
Donate some of my grandfather’s slides (namely, the photos he took of the construction of the NY State Thruway in Rockland County) to a historical society.
Find someone on my grandfather’s side of the family who wants the big family bible.
Figure out what to do with all the framed photos. (See conversion to cloud storage.)
Sell the toys.

By the end of 2022, it was all labeled and condensed. It felt good to at least know what was in every box. I got it down to something manageable.

The third shelf unit, the one with my daughter Anne’s boxes, remained untouched.

Cleaning Out the Old, Day 4 - Unpacking

2/13/2025

When I met Dave Marcus, it was a while after the dust had settled from my grandfather’s death. I was finally able to start looking forward again with the NY house sale and my duties as executor behind me. The divorce house renovations were finished, things were put away physically and metaphysically. Anne was in high school. It was a good time.

My little family (Anne, Dad and me) decided to celebrate by going to the John C Campbell Folk School in North Carolina for the week between Christmas and New Years. All three of us loved contradancing and music, Anne had been taken to events like this since she was born. It was a nice time to be together doing something I knew my stepmother would not want to join us for. It was becoming increasingly challenging to get my dad to myself, so their agreeing he should go was a real treat.

In those days, Dave-the-business-executive was a guy who took a lot of space. Full on, he could suck the air out of the room. He was used to getting what he wanted. He had a laugh that could cause everyone to pay attention. (He still does.) I saw him across the room and I immediately discounted him as That Kind of Guy. One day, I was working in an empty studio on a piano piece I needed to perform in a few weeks. Dave walked in, knew the piece, and asked me if he could play the missing clarinet part on his concertina for me. Well, sure. That’s helpful, even. We started making music together. Huh. This guy can sight read. And he’s musical. And we’re playing together intuitively. Interesting.

So it began. He met everyone at once that week; they had varying opinions. So did I. It took a few months for Dad and Anne to come around, and for Dave and me to extricate ourselves from varying degrees of dating relationships. Before long we were head-over-heels in a relationship that challenged us, pushed us to grow, opened us each to the possibility of a real partnership.

There were more deep signs that I can count that this was the person I’d been waiting for all my life, outer persona and all.

When I first visited Dave’s home, I was surprised at how little furniture he had in all that square footage. The furniture I had was the furniture he was lacking. He had nothing in the guest rooms. I had a day bed and extra antique dressers. He didn’t have a bedroom suite for himself – I had my grandfather’s that I was dying to use. Although his taste was modern, I could see my antiques fitting in the house and complimenting what was there.

My grandparent's antique furniture on Dave's log walls

And that empty basement.

The day the moving van pulled away, that formerly empty basement was piled, floor to ceiling along one wall. It was clear we needed to buy shelving. The boxes of my stuff were everywhere in Dave’s neat-as-a-pin living/dining room. It was an exhausting few months of unpacking upstairs while Dave mostly traveled for work. I questioned what I was doing more than once. I’m sure he did, too.

Ultimately, our hearts knew best. It’s been 21 years since we met, almost 18 that we’ve been married. I wouldn’t trade any of our time together for the world.

Meanwhile, the ticking time bomb in the basement sat quietly, year after year, waiting for us to have time to deal with it.

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Robbin Marcus

An occasional post from me, about stuff that interests me.

2025 blog series:
Cleaning Out the Old

2024 blog selections: Resistance

2023 blog series:
Slow Forward

2020 blog series:
1) Processing - Experience, Thought, Action
2) Diving for Light - Shedding light on a dark time

Cleaning Out the Old, Day 13 - A Whole Lotta Death

Cleaning out the Old, Day 12 - Formation

Cleaning Out the Old, Day 11 - I am Gen Jones

Cleaning Out the Old, Day 10 - From the Box

Cleaning Out the Old, Day 9 - The Unexpected Box

Cleaning Out the Old, Day 8 - My Turn

Cleaning Out the Old, Day 7 - On the Road to Letting Go

Cleaning Out the Old, Day 6 - The Dirty Work

Cleaning Out the Old, Day 5 - The Start

Cleaning Out the Old, Day 4 - Unpacking

Robbin Marcus

2019 blog series:
Exploring the Power of Habit

Archives

Robbin Marcus

2019 blog series: Exploring the Power of Habit

Archives

2019 blog series:
Exploring the Power of Habit