Letting Go Challenge: Week Eleven

• 1. Hat box
• 2. and 3. Old bottles of lotion
• 4. Old deoderant
• 5. “Katrina” dress
• 6. Undershirt
• 7. Green pair of pants
• 8. Blue pair of pants
• 9.  and 10.  Two broken hair clips
• 11. Old lipstick
• 12. Old mascara
• 13. Old foundation
• 14. Enbrel information box
• 15. Shake and Bake
• 16. Old pressed powder
• 17. Foot spray
• 18. Nail polish
• 19. Glue sticks
• 20. Lipstick case
• 21. Dead pen

Filed: 28 things, some trashed (why I held onto old grocery receipts I will never know), some actually filed. Still working on the medical file.

So apparently I forgot to take a picture before throwing the old stuff away and putting away the clothes in my “to donate” box.

A shame. I wanted to, in a few months, put all the pictures together to see all of the stuff–in one sitting–that I had cleared out of my house.

In the days after Hurricane Katrina, we picked through mud and dead fish to salvage what we could. Living right off the river, I had discovered there was a lot of both mud and dead fish.

Ew.

I can remember dunking my few clothes in bins of bleach water to get all of the dead fishyness out of them.  One of the things that had survived was a black t-shirt, sleeveless dress that I loved.  The bleach had given it red spots, so it looked like a really bad tie-dye job.

I loved it even more.

It’s been ten years since the hurricane, and, during that time it had managed to grow holes where the red spots were.

Ten years, and the red-bleached out spot became an ever-growing hole…right on the ass of the dress.

Still loved it. Still held onto it. Still slept in it, wore it around the house (sometimes even with a t-shirt covering the hole, but not all the time.

So….it was pretty much past time to get rid of it.

The filing is coming along–I’m still taking out stacks of paper in chunks and working through the chunks rather than fully entering the office itself.

The most interesting thing about the filing is that I’m filing stuff pretty much as soon as I get it (at least during the week that I get it) so, although the headway isn’t exactly grand, I’m at least not adding to the stacks to be dealt with later.

So there’s that.

 

Letting Go Challenge: Week Two

This week’s 21 things:

• very dirty, worn out door mat
• terra cotta owl
• Glen Haven ear cleanser
• Flea and Tick spray
• Cat Calmant
• Dermacare Anti-Itch Spray
• Hairball Remedy
• Extreme Groom Waterless Foam shampoo
• Chinese take out dish (cracked, courtesy of the dog)
• Rubbermaid storage piece and lid (chewed, courtesy of the dog)
• 9 small spools of thread (where do they keep coming from?)
• Peanut butter jar lid (I don’t even want to know)

This week was a trip back in time, and one I’m surprisingly grateful for.

All of the cat items (listed by brand in case I want to find them again) were from a time I had been reunited with my cats after Hurricane Katrina. (So, the stuff is at least NINE years old!)

I was very grateful that I had someone far away to take them in when I couldn’t. I was living in a fish camp on the river at the time, not exactly the driest place to be that summer, but it was drowned in mud and dead fish and, to this day, has yet to be rebuilt.

It has, however, been cleaned and gutted.  So, no dead fish smell.

I was grateful that someone had taken them in.  He had offered to take me in, too, but I was too stubborn, too tied to the Mississippi Gulf Coast and my family to ever truly consider leaving.

They had been staying in Florida, vacationing as I called it, while we dealt with the aftermath.

The hurricane itself was a breeze (ha!), I actually slept through the majority of it, but the aftermath was something entirely different. That was a rough time for me; I was living in a camper far too tight for cats who couldn’t stand each other, my alpha having already been returned to me due to her inability to play well with others. She’s never really played well with others.

Maybe that’s why I’m writing a book about her.

I was not so grateful, however, when I saw what shape they were in when they returned.

All of these products were either purchased by the Keeper of the Cats during their stay, or by me to help them recuperate after their stay.

It was a long road to recovery for all of us. It took them a long time get healthy again, and it took me a long time to get my anger within healthy parameters again.

In the end, I realized that he did the best that he could given the circumstances, and he did a hell of a lot more than I was able to, given the circumstances. Once I realized this, this key fact: that he, for all of his attributes and actions, character and circumstances, honestly did the best that he could do, there was something that was similar to–but not quite–forgiveness that sparked within me.

I had realized there was nothing to forgive despite how things may have appeared.

When that happened, I could forgive myself for subjecting them to such tribulation: there was nothing to forgive. I, too, had done the best that I could have done given my attributes and actions, character and circumstances.

There was nothing to forgive despite how things may have appeared.

And I’m not saying that I’d make the same choice today that I made back then. I have, after all, learned a LOT about emergency preparedness since Katrina.  It’s just that the choice I made was the best one I could have made at the time.

And that is glorious. No blame. No shame. It just was.

It probably was one of the most powerful lessons on forgiveness I’ve ever had.

A side note: I had originally included my Misfit  (so very NOT recommended), but switched it out for another item when I found out I may be able to get my money back on it.

The owl I had bought for someone’s birthday at least 2 years ago. I’ll be gifting it this week.

Forty-two things gone. The thread (all of it) re-homed with a sewing-addicted coworker, the rest of it trashed or re-homed.

I have to say that I am just a little bit impressed with myself.

I had a little lagniappe for the week: In cleaning out my junk drawer, I switched drawers, so that my “junk” drawer is a much smaller one, and what had previously been the junk drawer now holds dish towels. The result of this is that I have a little more room in my pantry, since it was holding the dish-towel overflow.

What a magnificent thing.

On the Tenth Anniversary of Hope and the Firefly Messengers

(Featured Image: Free Firely Wallpaper via Google Play)

Technically, today isn’t the tenth anniversary of hope.  That came a few weeks later.  But it’s what I choose to celebrate today, August 29, 2015.

Ten years ago, I was writing in a leather journal by candlelight. We had lost power and, despite the sweltering heat and the ever-hungry mosquitoes, it was far more pleasant outside than in.

I was filled with regret, I think, that one thing left undone before Katrina hit.

We didn’t take it seriously; we on the Mississippi Gulf Coast had weathered storms before.  We knew what supplies to gather, what actions to take, what food to store up.

I was on crutches, a foot surgery that had me off of work and unable to carry my last box up the stairs. It was a box of writing: EverQuest fanfiction (ha!), some half-way decent short stories I had dabbled with, and some really bad poetry I shouldn’t have, and journals. Pages and pages of journals. I had been stuck in a stasis for the past two years, post-divorce and having no clue of who I was.

So I wrote. And wrote. And wrote.

Of my love for the fishcamp, of my annoyance at my cats, of my first relationship after my marriage, in all its beautiful tumultuousness, and all the guilt and shame of years of silence.

I wrote.

I was tired and annoyed when my mother came to help me load my stuff up. Cats in carriers, important things, work clothes.  I was not as gracious as I could have been.

But that last box remained as I said, “Fuck it,” and threw my stuff and myself in the car and headed to my parents’ house. The box remained at the bottom of the stairs; I refused even my mother’s offer of carrying it up for me.

I was definitely not as gracious as I could have been.

As I wrote by candlelight, my father told me that I should stop. My mother told me I should stop. “You’re just going to rehash everything.”  They were right, of course, at least half-right: I did rehash everything. But writing is how I think. It’s how I process and refine my thoughts and beliefs.  I realize now that, at least on some level, it’s how I breathe.

I didn’t really have much of a choice.

My mother had also told me to “Cut the Polly Anna bullshit out.”

Before the night I was writing, I was okay, in that okay-sort-of-way that meant I didn’t understand a damn thing.  “We lost…” someone would say, and I would counter with something positive.  “The damage!” someone would exclaim, and say something uplifting and no doubt cliche.

Over and over and over again.

Now, in the present, I recognize it as shock, something so terrible and encompassing that my mind couldn’t process it. I saw a silver lining everywhere. All I could see were silver linings.

Until I broke, and then I didn’t anymore. Not a single silver lining.

That one thing left undone, and no way to see the consequences. Roads were flooded, blocked by debris.  There was no way to get to the fishcamp, although my dad valiantly tried until the water was too high, even for his high-sitting truck, and we had to turn back.

All I could see was darkness, All I could hear were stories of death and destruction through the radio.  The occasional “I’m okay,” text from friends when they’d go through wasn’t enough to keep my head above the proverbial water.

I was most definitely not okay.

They tried to comfort me, my parents, but I was inconsolable. I needed to be left alone with my darkness and my realization that I was not the strong person I thought I was: I was not able to maintain my okay-ness through the storm.

And I cried. Tears, fat and wet making the ink run against the page before I gave up trying to write. There was a great paradox: everything in me was exhausted, empty, and yet I was filled to the brim with fear. My cup overrunneth, and no amount of crying would stop it.

I hadn’t prayed in a very long time.  At this point, I was lost in the woods, God and faith and the core of who I was had escaped me, bounding like a rabbit just beyond the next tree.

And then I prayed.