Nearly a Year Now

So it's been nearly a year now and I've gone through quite a few changes.  The grandfather that I was going to come up here to help died and I moved from Florida to Ohio to help clean out his house.  The desperate scramble to get things packed equaled a crazy move in February and since the beginning of March I've been back in the state I spent most of my life in.

The plan was that I was going to live in this house and help clean it of all the stuff.  The hope was that by the end of a year my own, personal stuff, would be in the main area of the house and things would be clean enough that I could have family over for holidays.  The Wife and I have done a lot of work, but as is usually the case, every step has been a steep climb up a mountain.

The house is a mess.  The unfortunate part is that it looked neat, until you went into cupboards and opened up drawers.  So now that we are going through cupboards and drawers things look like a huge pit of despair.  It's unfortunate that no mess can really be cleaned up in a day, or even a month, because really I'm exhausted.



The living room has my dining room table in it, one wall is lined with furniture, the couch is pressed up against a different wall and the two huge recliners are in front of the couch.  Then there's tables and lamps all over the place, and each bit of furniture is crammed full of stuff.  In the kitchen the cabinets have been overflowing with items, we just found a box of *wrapped* dishes, probably the Easter set of cookware, and little boxes filled with junk bits that were from the drawers above said cabinet, got full and got moved down.

I love old people, but the insane drive to hold on to everything because you might need it one day has been so forcefully ingrained in their minds from Depression Era lifestyles that one *has* to counteract it with sane, rational thought.  The problem is that there are so many useful things that need to be given away or sold that one could spend years trying to figure it all out.  I'm prepared to spend years figuring it all out.

We were the first people to order trash pick up at this house.  Ever.  So you can imagine the bags I've found in closets, the canisters cut up and the pieces scattered into different piles.  There were age old 7up cans, still full, that were in the downstairs fruit bin.  (it's a basement pantry basically, shelves all over the place and storage for everything from matches to moth balls to cans of tomato paste so old the contents rattle inside.)  I love to recycle, and have been doing my best to do so, but there's only so much a person can take before they have to throw things away.

In this almost year of living here, I've found that every step of the way something goes wrong, that each move I make has both repercussions as well as elation's, and that my patience for dealing with things that take more than a month to be decided on is waning.  I need some peace of mind.  I need a breather, and I need to find some way to relax.

I thought, maybe writing would help me.  So here I am.  Writing.  I will do my best to do it regularly, if only because the action of thinking about things and writing about them is better than the action of stewing in frustration and feeling yourself get black with bad emotions inside.  I don't want to be that crabby old woman that everyone avoids because she has nothing nice to say.  That was my grandmother and I saw what her life was like.  I want to be my other grandmother, the one who's still cheerful and friendly and who knows that when a person is around, they don't want to feel all negative, they want to be happy.

I need to refind my happy.