Two grueling hours in, basting in 90 degree humidity, I could have served myself for supper with an apple between my teeth and a side of smashed spuds. A half-kaput ceiling fan of the cheaper variety, brand new just a decade prior, dropped a single 40-watt spot straight down. Installation of an upgraded fixture held a place of honor at the bottom of my husband's honey-do list. I couldn't turn a blind eye as easily as him, couldn’t wait another ten years to hit that room. It was Go Time.
A late summer thunder-boomer threatened; the same not generally heard first or even smelled. Muggy pea-soup swelled the second-story bedrooms. I kept in the crosshairs of an Aloha Breeze super-fan, shifting it toward me as I moved from one disheveled pile to the next despite gaining little relief.
When the dim fell darker, I cut the power to the vacuum, crossed to the window and did a quick Al Roker. Laden grayish pockets crowded above, the underbelly of a pregnant mutt scoping a drop-site. I quipped to a perceived audience, “And here's what's happening in your neck of the woods.”
Indian summer's slide into fall is a mixed bag––one foot in today, one in tomorrow. All the windows wide open meant listening for raindrops, then racing around shutting out the blessed reprieve. I returned to my cleaning feeling like an aging plow mule, not old enough to be put out to pasture, not young enough to enjoy the exertion. And not looking forward to winter coming either, but given no vote in the matter.
Our younger son, Nick, returned to college one week earlier, the aftermath a disastrous mishmash of teenage leavings spewed across every walkway and a bathroom in dire need of HAZMAT intervention.
This day marked the second round of detoxifying the upper level of our home―I overdid the day before, got on a roll and couldn't seem to stop. Not that there is a specific stopping point at this stage of reconstruction. I just pushed and pulled, groaned and growled, until my clothes were soaked and my backbone baulked. Downside of claiming “neat-freak” is no matter how mountainous the job, it's impossible to quit mid-mess. I inadvertently missed lunch and forty-five minutes of The Young and the Restless. Even so, at nearly five o'clock I had barely made a dent.
But this was not unanticipated. I had been in the trenches before, knee deep in Fischer-Price baby toys, scattered Mattel board game pieces, and orphaned mini cartridges and batteries from Game Boys, V-Tech Power Pads, and Sega Game Gears. Had sorted, hunted down parts, and reassembled boy-toys of every kind for twenty-five straight years, starting with Playskool's Weebles Wobble But They Don't Fall Down graduated to Microsoft X-Box. The last, hoped but not, grand overhaul occurred the previous fall―Nick's freshman year at SIUE.
The day after Nick bugged-out for his waiting dorm room, I climbed the stairs to his abandoned room. He'd turned a page and I was proud he was following after his brother, pursuing the higher education his father and I missed out on. But that didn't make his departure any easier. When I stepped into the empty space my chest tightened and I felt that achy-breaky thing that leaves simple separation anxiety in the dust. My brain knew Nick wasn't gone for good, but my heart hadn't got the text message.
A few minutes lagged in slo-mo while waves of empty nest syndrome pummeled. Then I gathered myself then and did a 360. The nest wasn't empty so much as it was trashed. What remained now was nowhere to go but up. Or maybe out. I briefly considered heaving everything through the window. Thankfully, my Mrs. Clean alter ego rationally reminded that someone near and dear to me would have to clear the wreckage off the lawn too. I wasn't up for double-duty.
Déjà vu. Nick's brother, Nathan, left a similar catastrophe six years before as he headed to Southeast Mo. I recalled kidding the boys, calling them alien abduction babies―lacking their parents' spic-n-span skills (and in Nathan's case, our love of cheese). The collective slouchy state of their bedrooms left little doubt in my mind that something was cosmically amiss despite friends' reassurance that teenage girls weren't any tidier.
So there I found myself, 365 days later, facing my nemesis. Thunder rumbled a call to battle. The heavens opened in a deluge. I sprung into action. An old soldier in the clash against clutter, I knew from the onset what I faced: a hard fight to the better end.
I hunkered down in a corner demilitarized zone and coordinated my attack. Outnumbered on all flanks, my intent was to deploy from the point of least resistance―
the doorway corridor― picking off my opponent with perimeter sweeps, then implementing a full frontal assault on the under-eve closet: the terrible toy zone.
The strategy worked well. Much ground was gained on the objective before discovering myself surrounded, cut off by a five-foot barricade of sorting containers and sprawling trash piles, incapable of even minimal maneuvering. My Aloha Breeze fan now MIA, I feared it suffered a hostage situation behind enemy lines.
Another hour in the fray and in desperate need of reinforcements, I couldn't secure a single spot to sit and regroup. Forced to keep moving or surrender, I pulled more boxes from the toy pit and heaped them higher and higher. Every inch gained was lost by a spill of Micro Machines and Hot Wheels, Legos and puzzles pieces, Beanie Babies and baseball cards. Somewhere in my head Sgt. Carter yelped at Gomer Pyle. “Move it! Move it!”
A CD-player box centered in my sights, but it was figured for empty, like so many other stray cartons I had raided and flung toward the hallway. Surprised at the heft, because the player was already dug out of the rubble, I secured it and squeezed toward the bed, cautiously curious as to what covey of contraband it contained.
Same as everything before, it was covered with more dust than Mr. Magoo’s reading glasses. I placed the box on a stack of loose paraphernalia―unmatched playing cards, keys, Monopoly money, and Risk plastic roman numerals―and sighed for the hundredth time. Then looked around for my Swiffer duster. Swif apparently had seen enough engagement for one day and was retreated to parts unknown.
Exhaustion teetered at the edge of my resolve, threatening dramatic crash and burn. Screw it, I thought and swiped the dust with my forearm. A gritty film stuck, reminding how the boys looked after playing trucks in the dirt. I scowled at the grime before popping the lid.
A faint order wafted upward. Good gawd, an old Gatorade bottle. What the . . . I raised those boys better. I lifted the bottle to eye level and inspected an ominous pale liquid. A deeper scowl crimped my parched lips. Surely to all that is sacred to mothers, and the cleaning product industry at large, it wasn't . . .
Fully disillusioned, I set the bottle aside, first checking the seal on the cap, and started pitching scraps of paper printed with foreign symbols into a Carolina Tar Heels waste can. The drawings looked Goth, an interest of Nick's in eighth grade. Next, several signed pages of notations and expressions of concern in colored felt-tip, some followed by hearts and x's and o's: “I'm here for you, Nick” and “Hope you feel better soon.” Puzzled, I racked my brain but couldn't recall him missing more than a day or two of classes ever. Not even for fake sick.
Green Day sheet music lay beneath―set aside without reading―plus two Playboys, September '93 and March '98, and a handful of colored, elastic hair bands. I smiled, amused for the first time in long hours, remembering finding a nudie magazine in Nathan's room after he left for college too. How they came into possession of these publications, I didn't think I needed to know. Buried near the bottom of the box: a photo. And instantaneous recall.
The Warped Tour
The ash bottle
The condolences
I shoved debris across the bed so I could sit on the edge, clutching the nearly empty box as if breakable. Nick, in a Blink t-shirt with his cap worn backward (looking not a day over ten, though fourteen), his best friend Steve, and a band member from Warped Tour 2002―making a hand gesture moms aren't suppose to understand―stood frozen in time, mugging for the camera. I had stumbled across Steve's box.
My mind wound backward to what had slipped away in the business of keeping pace with my own life and family (until Green Day music back-dropped in a movie), to small group of young men and one girl at the grave site singing along with “Time of Your Life” blaring from the boom box near Steve's casket. Each friend, my sons included, made it to the song's end. They did better than me.
Stunned, I sat for unknown minutes in the war-zone I had created, then pulled the Goth drawings out of the waste can, got down on my knees to make sure I retrieved all, and put every piece back into the box in the order removed. The ashy Gatorade liquid―water, Nick confided once, Steve used to flick his cigarettes into―was returned last. It could smell up my clean house any day.
Steve's unconventional funeral replayed. Had the mourners been dressed in ghoul-garb and served cocktails from the casket lid, the scene could have rocked a dreadfully delightful Halloween party. The depressed, wrongly-medicated sixteen-year-old hung himself in a barn adjacent to his home. His parents buried him in keeping with his interests: dressed in skateboard clothes, his red hair spiked like a troll doll, and black-polished fingernails. Punk music blasted from the funeral home's stereo system. A first, I'm sure.
This landmine was a severe setback, affecting a truce for the day. Tears smeared my vision as I lifted the box to a shelf in Nick's clothes closet. There was a colossal difference between Nathan relocating to another state, Nick away at college, and Steve's absence.
A lot sifts through a parent's mind when bivouacked in the middle of their children's former lives. Seems impossible to forget a single minute of their growing up until you unearth a faded memory: a platoon of plastic arm men―a handful with their heads freakishly decapitated; a bevy of stuffed animals, wildly loved until the arrival of the first live pet; a grade school hand-printed note: I LV MOM, NiCK, embellished with a lopsided heart.
After a week of intense skirmishes, my personal war was won. I managed to scrounge through and box up every surviving toy my sons played with since birth. And yes, there were many casualties―my neck, my back, my elbows. Not to mention some unfortunate unladylike language.
From the moment I knew they existed, those boys laid unmistakable siege upon my heart. My orders now: send them out on their own, hoping I have equipped them with not only courage but kindness. With a fresh coat of paint, new linens, and a working light fixture, the upstairs is finally suitable for future daughters-in-law and grandchildren. I am ready for whatever comes next. Bring it on. Hooah.
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Wanda Morrow Clevenger lives in Hettick, IL. Over 200 pieces of her work appear in numerous print and electronic literary journals and anthologies. She used to keep birds, but they kept committing suicide. She tried to write an essay about the extensive misfortunes but no matter how she spun it, she came out looking pretty bad. Now she mostly writes poetry and is currently shuffling the pages of two poetry manuscripts; one compiled entirely of poems bent from early 1900s Leavenworth Prison records.
