IT WAS A HOT FUDGE MILK SHAKE.

When we stay in one place for a long time, memories embed themselves in odd places.  I know where I was and what I was wearing ten years ago last Sunday, who I was with, and what we did, because this is Big Trash Week.

In this town and the town before, Big Trash Week  happens twice a year.  We all drag the big things (that Goodwill won’t take) to the curb, with hope that someone with a pickup truck takes the Big Trash away for reuse before the actual trash truck arrives in the morning.  Smart scavengers begin prowling early, to get the best selection.  Anything between the sidewalk and the curb is fair game, a free shopping spree for anyone willing to put pride aside and dive in.

This spring, I neither put out nor picked up anything from the street.  I have a Jeep.  I could have picked.  I have a big, strong boyfriend.  I could have put.

This spring is different because while I do have many things that I don’t need, I don’t need anything that I don’t have.  Got that?  I won’t go looking.  A chair might see me, a softie for a lonely single creaky seat, and want to come home with me.

It’s like visiting a shelter just to pet the kittens.  No.

In spring, ten years ago, I cruised for furniture with a friend.  She had just left her husband, rented a big-to-her house, and didn’t have enough places to sit.  I’d given her the world’s ugliest sofa-bed, a kitchen table, and six chairs.  Her daughter already had my grandma’s day bed and a new mattress, and she had a great mattress of her own and one dresser.  In one afternoon, we found an antique dining room table, two dressers, a clean rug, a desk, a bed frame for her very tall son, and the cutest little loveseat and two matching tiny chairs.  Those were orange and yellow cut velvet, and I was powerfully pregnant.

We celebrated her freedom and mine.  She had a lease and first and last months’ paid rent, and wouldn’t live in a trailer any more.   I had two more months or so until my belly finished cooking up a real live baby. That Sunday afternoon, we were broke women on a mission.

It was a grand day.  I wore my favorite floor-swishing sun dress and a big straw hat to balance out the belly.  We loaded my tiny station wagon to bursting, then tied some more on top.  What didn’t fit, I guarded on the curb so that no one else would claim her treasures.  Try arguing with a fat pregnant woman sprawled on three pieces of tiny velvet lady-furniture with a milkshake and The National Enquirer.  Only one man did.  All I had to say was, “Nope. Already mine.”

I am shameless when duty calls.  Ask about my parking-space-saving techniques sometime.

My friend lived in her perfect house for three years, and then everything went to hell and into a storage unit.  The stored stuff was later sold or carried off or stolen, no one really knows.  When I found out that she was far behind and locked out, I paid the bill, but too late.  The manager of the storage lockers had sent letters, and she had not sent rent.  That’s something we know.

Spring Big Trash always makes me think of my friend, her new freedom that spring and her later losses, and the joy of free stuff for an empty house.

I hope she’s doing well.  I hope she remembers, too.

 

 

 

 

 

HUNTING AND PRETENDING

The time has changed, and the sun sets later in the day now.  We pretend that it does, anyway.

Extra daylight in the evening means less in the morning.  I do not adjust easily to the loss of an hour at the beginning of a day, but the dog and the small person seem to take the shift in stride.

I have not.  I am sleepy.

The evening daylight, though, is precious and beautiful.  Today was rainy in a gently soaking way; my hair has been damp for hours now, and I had to change clothes after a walk in what seemed like not-rain that seeped through my down jacket.  My jacket didn’t mind.  The rain was welcome.  Rain is not snow, and mid-March is not dark like mid-February, thanks to this time change.

The dog and I looked for signs of spring and found them.  The ammi majus is a centimeter high above the wet leaves, and some escaped English ivy and greater periwinkle foliage has started to push out soft new shoots.  Neighbors’ irises are greening through their soggy leftover leaves of last summer.  Robins land in little fat flocks on the bike path and leave again when we get close.  The dog knows more about all of this than I do, and he tells me what he can.  I’m slow to understand, but he is patient.

Put your nose here, he offers.  A wonderful playful thing happened here this morning, and this broken branch is proof of the thing.  This flattened grass is proof of a sleeping newborn thing, and this spot of mud in the gravel is proof of another, bigger thing than us stepping here in the night.  Look here with all of your senses, and you’ll know.

I try.  I’m better with green things.

Soon, on a less rainy-muddy day, the small person and I will go hunting for green.  We look for buds and shoots every spring, just like Gram and I used to look.  Gram knew where to find green in our small world, the big yard at 305 Napoleon, and sometimes in other places on our walks, but most of our discoveries happened at home.  I hoarded the spring things in my heart, and I felt like we were rich with new green, richer certainly than the people in big houses with plain grass lawns.  We had sweet peas when no one else had them, and hollyhocks that spread from our center of town to every edge, three blocks in each direction.  We had daffodils older than Gram and Papa, and peonies–not green at first, but glowing red–that came from the oldest part of the cemetery.  Our green was special, ancient to me, and unique.

The green that the small person and I find will be a little of that, and a lot of the wider world in which we exist.  We have the same irises and daffodils, by a happy accident of fate.  Even before we migrated back to this house, we found excuses to walk past to visit our daffodils at this red-diamond-window house where she lived before she was born.

Extra hours of daylight will come for real, minute by minute, soon enough.  For now, we shift in a big jump all at once and pretend that we have more, and that is good enough for me.