The Art of Keeping House

Sometimes it's a good thing that you can't necessarily see what you're doing

Sometimes it’s a good thing that you can’t exactly see what you’re doing

When you go back home, what vestiges of your former self do you stumble across? You know, the things that you had partially forgotten about and never really want to revisit again in their fullest aperture?

When back at my dad’s, I often wake up and do an hour of yoga in my old bedroom before emerging for coffee and nourishment. It’s a small room, and I have strip of clear space that is just wide enough to enroll my mat adjacent to the bed. It’s during these moments of supposed shanti that I spend a lot of time hovering over the floor. These are the moments where I get an up-close view of things that I left behind: high school keepsakes and old photos, all stuffed under my bed.

“Oh, I don’t want to deal with you,” I think to myself as I try to maintain yogic concentration. The scrapbooks and most notably a wedding album that I was instructed not to throw away holds some kind of cosmic force there underneath that twin size extra long mattress. I’d like to think that one day I will want to page through the handmade album, but in all honesty, I doubt that I will ever feel that way.

Fast-forward to the nighttime and 30 degree weather calls for a bone drying fire in the living room. I’m happy for the warmth but perhaps even more so I’m grateful for its destructive properties. That’s because this morning that I also discovered a shoebox stuffed with dozens of fat white envelopes that had long-since worn out their welcome. These packets hold four year’s worth of receipts from every purchase I ever made while occupying another life. Not all of the purchases were mine.

Unlike the neglected photo album, I see no use in holding on to these scraps of paper, and that’s where the November fire comes in handy.

I grabbed the first envelope, white and bulging with the words “January 2007” written in cursive across the front in someone else’s handwriting. Without hesitating too much, I toss it into the building fire and watch for what I expect will be an unceremonious act of rapid disintegration. But receipts, as I soon would learn, are not exactly pure paper material. They are constructed of something a bit more enduring, and as such they don’t vaporize like the weekly PennySaver that usually kindles a fire’s start.

“Megan, you’d make the worst firebug,” my dad says as he alternates between watching me tend fire and following the Bruins hockey game on the living room TV. He’s giving me pointers on how I need to open the envelopes and smash up the receipts, thus encouraging more oxygen to flow between the hundreds of scraps of financial transaction. I do as I’m told, but I don’t want to. I don’t think dad sees the consequences that come with peering inside these envelopes that so closely document my past.

But ever the good daughter, and also not wanting to cause too much of a scene, I comply with his instructions. In doing so I can’t help but glance inside one of the canted open business envelopes. I glimpse a handwritten receipt procured in Thailand that records the purchase of a string of pearls. I still have the necklace and certainly love it, but what I don’t love is how it reminds me of the circumstances under which they were purchased. Another time. Another life.

As much as I thought that I could avoid direct confrontation with the past, in order to destroy all of this history, I have to open up each and every packet. This would not be a simple case of ignoring an old photo album that lay uncracked under a bed in virtual perpetuity.

Like Dad, my attention alternates between the Bruins game and the growing collection of ashen receipts as they sit atop the pyre and stubbornly don’t disappear as they are told.

“Now swirl them around.” Dad instructs after I believe him to be no longer paying attention. I want to do no such swirling, but for him I manage a half-hearted poke at the gray cremains. He sighs. I really hate that this evolution—burning away five years of my life—and it’s taking up three periods of regulation hockey.

Dad knows what I’m doing, even though I only make slight mention of my past as he helps to tear up empty checkbooks holding carbon copies of addresses and surnames I once but no longer claim. I think about where I was, and I think about how I’d like to now go and get that album from upstairs and add it to the activity. The only problem is that I don’t want to kick up any further dust that might not readily burn. That would probably be too much for a long holiday weekend like this one.

“I think I’m going to be single for the rest of my life,” I announce as I toss another envelope into the heat. The packet’s wobbling trajectory misses my target and instead slides down the side and rests against the chimney wall so that I am forced to go in with iron implements and try for a do-over.

My dad is still watching the game. He doesn’t alter his gaze as he rebuts my announcement: “Listen. You don’t know what the hell the future is going to hold,” he offers as Boston is awarded a hooking penalty. I know he is right, but I also know my habitudes.

This life that I am burning up- the better years of my twenties—that was the time I spent trying to figure out who I was. I’m well into my thirties now, and that part of me is no longer a mystery. Accordingly, I have far less patience for bullshit these days, and this is why I offered such a realistic assessment to my father.

Still, I know he is right, just as well as I know that most of us are pawing through this life in the dark, hoping to come across a few lucky bumps that will help to make our personal circumstances a bit brighter.

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It’s never as bad as we think. Just a little messy.

I see this now as I sit in the back of my evening flight departing New England, even as I occupy the very last row in a seat that has no functioning overhead light. I am recording this entire entry into my notebook in the blind. I have an easier time tracing the constellations that sit above the cloud layer than I do discerning any of the words that I am scribbling—but I know that years of practicing in the light will probably produce something that can ultimately be transcribed. I have some faith in the system and the foundation that have brought me to where I am today.

I can’t control whether or not these words will produce any appreciable utility, but I don’t want to lose out on a chance to at least try.

I have no idea what I’ll be tossing into the family fire when we all get a few more years down the road. Truth be told, I kinda hope that it will be nothing. The past shouldn’t be destroyed no more than the future, and I guess that the best I can try to focus on is what’s going on right now: a pretty view of an east coast winter sky that was a product of my desire to go back home and attend to my past, present and future.

Awareness has many aches and triumphs, and no one can fault me for at least trying to go all in.

As for the Bruins, final score of the hockey game was Blue Jackets 1, Bruins 3.