This is a day when you and I are alone.  We have planned a virtual party for Grandpa in Dublin, Ireland.  Its his birthday.  We will make a cake (the kind that you like, because Grammie already made him a Strawberry Rhubarb pie, his favorite).  You made one scrap paper pointy hat yesterday and we have two more to make for sissy and me.  We plan to make a painting of grandpa and sit him in a chair for his party. All of this silliness may happen the way we plan or maybe not.  We’ll see. Then we’ll Skype him in Dublin.

Uncle AJ comes home next Thursday and leaves again on Saturday to go to New York for job training.  Then he comes home again, all trained up and moves to Southern California.  With a job.  Cool.  I am amazed at something that is a thing that young people do.  Although I did it, most of us do. Your young man daddy hasn’t been too successful at that.  I feel sick about him this morning.  He’s an ache in my belly.  He and your mommy are so irresponsible, and so messy.

They opened up the shed, I told them to review its contents and put things there they cannot take with them (where ever they go?).  But no place else will they store things.  This is it.  So make decisions about what fits.  The shed is behind the cottage here.  Its where they have kept things since they moved here into this place and then to Montana.  It seems so reasonable to me, generous of me even. Mommy pulled things out and all day brought me things they had “lost”.  One discovery after another occupied their time.  That’s how sorting goes.  I asked for your old crocs because they would fit sissy, but told them I wanted nothing else in the cottage.  They only had one.  But Liza has two feet. Kids things they wanted me to keep would move to the garage into my storage area.  Okay.  Fine.  What a mess.  Not okay.

Because they left it out overnight, and another and then I called and after two more days outside stuff everywhere, shed open, mice and rats running in and out, Metro exploring, peeing, well, you know, making a mess of it all.  Then it rained. My tummy is in knots.  I look out the window and see books, cardboard boxes of stuffed animals, clothes, paper goods all sopped.  A sewing machine, and what else?  I can’t look, but do.  All Ruined!

Waste sickens me.  One thing I can say for myself, is that I take care of things.  My version of coping with a change overtime in my economic status from poor working class kid to professional is that I take care of things.  My mom did too.  So does my sister. Stuff isn’t just stuff, it’s all precious, usable by somebody and to be cared for in all cases.  How is it that your daddy and mommy didn’t get that?  Especially your daddy?  He was raised with me as his mommy.  Is is part of a developmental deficit?  Diagnosis “spacial delay and inability to read social cues”. Screw that.  Grow up.  I called you and told you it was going to rain.  I told you.  I told you.

A fungus grows, begins with tiny spores that attach themselves on cool and damp, vulnerable places; take hold, ache and scream through host cells- at my temples, lower back, neck and shoulders and result in a few days of stomach afire and hot diarrhea.  Daddy’s crop of spores results in a malformed growth, racked with disease and mutates into a spore producing packet of pus and gore. All inside of my guts. He breeds his patch of spore-filled mushy odiferous fungus; a smelly slime in me.  And I walk right into it every time.  I know that’s gross talk and someday when you read this you may wish you hadn’t. Your mommy adds another layer of goo and your grandma, always ill-prepared, slide right in, pops the spore puff and it begins all over- worsens each time, because of  each last time it happened. Old spores ignite with mushy bubbling life and spew out, sputtering emptying me of all hope.  Where is there space for such slime?  For stinky, spore producing, dog vomit slime?  Not on this earth,  Not on my planet.  Not on our planet.

But you say to me.  Mommy and daddy want a blue house.  I want to live in a blue one, not this ugly gray house.  I’ll come visit you.  Where did this idea come from?  I’m too sick to process it.  Too lousy with the smell of it all.  I have to stop looking out the window at the evidence, at the slimy cardboard deep in damp books, children’s books, stop noticing.  Let go of stuff, let go of them.  Like a divorce, I have to fit them into your life.  And endure the endless cramping ache, writhing pain that comes from noticing all the crap just outside my window.  Walk by singing, You are my sunshine….gma