Spring cleaning

Sighing, I glanced around the apartment. At the piles. The bags. Boxes of papers that hadn't seen the light of day since sometime in the mid-90s.

Did I really need to keep the postcard that announced my position on the Dean's List? Did I need to keep all of them? "All" being a relatively large number given graduation in eight semesters but certainly not eight.

The report card from my worst semester: all Bs and a C? It was the season of my sister's wedding and my mother's move out of the country. I'd taken off a week for the former and stayed put for the latter. It was the semester I started working full time instead of just weekends with the occasional odd weeknight job. First aid at intramural sports. Tutoring. Editing papers. It was the semester I started working at the paper, a job that would change my life. Words at the bottom of the sheet announced that I was in "good standing." I would have begged to differ. My footing was shaky, at best.

Loan papers from a car I no longer have, that no longer exists? After a year of loaning it my sister and brother-in-law, they wrote me a check and bought it outright. The title had not yet transferred when somebody rear-ended them, raining glass from the shattered back windshield onto my nephew in his car seat. The car was totaled and he had nightmares for years from an event he really couldn't remember.

Insurance documents from the car before that? I gave it to my brother when I graduated from college – more of a curse than a blessing as I found myself without a car for six months and he found himself working to keep a car running to get him to work. He fell asleep at the wheel after a long shift at work, driving East to see our sister and her new baby, the baby that was in the accident above. I bet that one of my newspaper friends still has the picture of us, the car (Li'l Vicious) and myself at a service station/video/bait shop.

Letters from my brother and my mom when they lived in that other country? Hand-written letters addressed to "Kristi" and "Kiki" respectively. I drove back from Canada, not as far as it seems, for a 45-minute phone call with them during spring break, talking in the backroom of my friend's father's hardware store, the smell of sawdust… I'm not sure if that was real or if I've imagined it and assigned to the memory. The same with the feel of flannel, do I just remember it from pictures I barely remember in Detroit?

I drove back to Canada after the call. I never managed to visit them in the Caribbean. I just didn't have the money. My brother stayed with me for a month the next summer, the summer that she stayed on an island and he bounced from couch to couch. I was almost 20; he was just 18. Neither of us really knew how to take care of ourselves, much less each other.

A handwritten recipe for my grandfather's apple kuchen. He tried teaching all of us, at various points. I might have been the only one who wrote it down, but I haven't tasted it since before he died. I looked for the recipe for ages and couldn't find it. There's a scribble in the corner of the page from where I tried to get the pen to work. I don't remember that. Knowing myself, though, I probably sucked on the pen to try to get the ink to flow and ended up with a blue tongue.

I spent more time sorting paper than anything, than wrestling boxes and a treadmill from the closet, than sorting clothes, purses and hats, trying to get rid of that which I didn't use. I took a break, late in day and baked cookies for friends, sharing a beer or two in a bookstore that stayed open late so that we could share beer and cookies. They gave me a book and for the rest of my life, or as long as my mind holds onto it, I'll think of the ale. The honeyed oatmeal cookies. The friends.

Maybe I shouldn't get rid of it all.


Tag: Cleaning Memories