At least the last few days that's mostly what I've been doing
And all around the house as I pick up things off the floor I'm finding these notes and vision boards and things that say I want everything to be clean and open and airy and beautiful and you know the exact opposite of what she manifests
So I'm going through this room that when she let me in there I asked her what it was and she said who the f*** knows
While she's in the hospital she gave me these rules about which rooms I'm not to touch
Basically all the rooms she's been working in so the kitchen table area and the hold in and her whole bedroom I can't touch anything in those rooms
But the room that she let me in that she doesn't know what it's in that's completely full like it's difficult for me to go through things because it's difficult for me to move anything to another spot and not trap myself That's how full it is
I'm going through things and you know I'm not supposed to throw anything away right unless it's obviously trash and what's obviously trash is somewhat up for debate so that's part of the reason why that room I can work in cuz she doesn't know what's in there and she doesn't really care about it she probably hasn't looked at anything in that room for at least 12 years
And so from a certain standpoint you would say well that's all garbage throw it away but in fact it's it's not really all garbage there's you know a lot of artwork that's where she put the stuff from Edith for me that she said for 15 or 20 years that she's never told me she had
She also has a lot of art supplies
And a lot of those are dried up or whatever and so they're easier to throw away but she has all these containers I mean some of them are boxes and some of them are those plastic totes of various sizes full of fabric I mean like the whole middle of the room the thing that's blocking everything is all these boxes of fabric
And I'm like I'm probably going to have to move this fabric out of here so that I can get the things but I'm kind of trying to go through it and periodically I have to take a break from it and I'm talked to her on the phone a lot so I'm not saying that I'm making the most productive use of my time that I could you know if I was an overlord standing over myself I would say you are not working as hard as you could be but I'm doing the best that I can
So as I'm looking at these boxes of fabric one of them has just been transported from place to place it's from the mid-80s when she was going to make some fabric dolls right and so it has some patterns and it has some stuffing material and it has some things that are you know technically not garbage but you know I'm trying to reduce the amount of stuff because she has to look at every piece of garbage and you know she says oh I'm not going to keep all this fabric but there's literally too metric tons of fabric okay maybe not literally but it feels that way
So I'm like she's not going to make these dolls she wasn't even willing to pull out her sewing machine to alter a jacket that I had bought that just needed you know the sleeves to be the armhole to be widened a little bit or whatever you know I mean she's she's not going to do that she says she's going to sew things but she's not going to sew dolls and it's not like they were you know special patterns or whatever and I just I just do that all the way
And then I found another box that said white burlap and it's full of white burlap that I'm pretty sure she was using to cover things in her last studio so that's been several years ago and when she thought we might have to cover some things for the open studio she bought a whole bunch of white linen
She ordered it through the mail she didn't open it or bring it to the studio but she did buy it
So I'm looking at this box of burlap and it's not new it's you know been hanging in place for years so it's dusty and I mean yes technically burlap is washable but it doesn't look good after you wash it so you know if you're going to use it for a decorative purpose it really needs to be new crisp burlap once you wash it it's good for you know pet bedding or something but it's not good for anything decorative and when she thought she was going to need covering she didn't go and get the burlap from the other room she ordered more linen so I figured well the linen replaces the burlap so I threw that away
And there's a box that says couch covers and I opened it because I thought oh well that's great because couch covers are specific to the couch and we don't have a couch so that ought to be pretty obviously trash but the problem is that it isn't actually couch covers it's material that you could put over couches not like upholstery material but like you know woven fabric like I don't know blankety kind of stuff and it's pretty it's really pretty and so I looked at it and I'm like oh I can't throw that away but she doesn't want to live in a place with carpet or drapery because that leads to allergies and breathing problems she doesn't have a couch she doesn't have a plan to buy a couch so what would this stuff be used for it doesn't really have a purpose right so it's pretty but it doesn't have a purpose but if I look at it and go oh that's pretty I can't throw it away I think she'll look at it and say oh I can't part with that
So I think I'm going to sneak it out and take it and donate it somewhere I mean I guess I don't have to sneak it right now but she's coming home from the hospital today so I mean that's what this is like for me it's like you know it's either like throw away obvious trash which theoretically is not even like a piece of paper that has something written on it could be thrown away
I found these receipts when I was trying to clean out a Chester drawers that I thought Meredith might want I found these receipts for yard work and I thought well surely those are trash but I ask her and she's like no you have to save all of those here's a clip you can as you find them you can clip them all together
And it's like you know she's not going to be deducting her yard work she doesn't need those receipts for that it doesn't have his information on it it's just like a little generic receipt from a receipt book that you buy it like the drugstore or something so I ask her I'm like why am I saving these and she's like well we're not taking them with us they'll be thrown away before we leave and it's like so why do I have to take the time to pick them up one by one and put them into a pile and put a clip on them I don't understand
And on the one hand I feel like I should be helping her and helping her would constitute tough love where I'm getting rid of things that she may or may not want to get rid of and the most obvious place to do that is with things that she doesn't know what they are and doesn't care and isn't going to miss them but like when I was taking her I would take her a box of things and say I'm pretty sure this is all either garbage or donate just look at it real quick and see
And then I see those things sitting around in here like none of them were something we could get rid of even though they were all kind of old and ugly and things that I would have thrown away I really would have thrown away
So I don't know
I feel like if what I'm trying to do is help her get to her goal not what she's told me or goal is but what she's told herself over and over and over again for you know 40 or 50 years what her goal is I'm going to have to kind of not do what she wants me to do
And on the one hand I feel kind of proud of that but on the other hand I feel kind of guilty about that so it's it's weird
Anyway she's getting out of the hospital today and I ask her if she wanted me to come and pick her up and she's like no I'll take a taxi home you just do what you're doing so
But I've had a hard time getting going today and the cat was very unhappy cuz she's been gone for a long time and he needed attention and had to check the fly traps I set yesterday with wine
Because she still insists on having compost actually on her dining table she's like oh I put in a container with a lid on it and something on the lid so but if it's a problem you can take it out and put it in the compost outside That's like Jesus
