May 2nd

You can learn a lot from selling a house. Despite the calamity we call COVID-19, my wife and I decided to carry on with the long ago-developed plan to put our house of twenty-seven years on the market on May 1. “It’s really a good time,” we were told. “There’s not much inventory.” Inventory doesn’t much matter when there aren’t people seeking it. Nonetheless, we grew weary of all the cleaning and preparation without a defined deadline. So we bought the notion that low inventory translated into greater buyer interest and, just to show the pandemic virus that while it could keep us away from others it could not protect us from ourselves, we listed our house two days early: on April 28th.

Twenty-seven years isn’t a long time for the earth; since the skies have had atmosphere and the seas have had fish, some of the great glaciers of history slid a mere foot or so down unsuspecting ravines in such a yawn of an evolutionary moment. A few decades is ample time, however, for a family of four to amass quite a bit of material (and arguably immaterial) goods. My! Corners and cabinets gathered more than cobwebs since the dawn of our inhabitance in this house. I thought I had been doing a reasonable job over the years working towards a balance of the consumer scale by donating as much each cycle of the sun as we bought. I wasn’t even close. You can hide many things in plain site during a third of a lifetime. I managed to accomplish more than my fair share of such optical trickery.

Clothes, shoes, games, pieces of wood, unattached screws and other hardware orphans, misshapen boards, boards with good shape but no obvious purpose, paint, used brushes, stains, ties from my father that have gone in and out of style at least a dozen times, photos, receipts, previously lost socks, unopened mail, old bank and credit card statements, letters from a millennium when humans used fountain pens, holiday cards, envelopes, books, evidence of the progress of computer technology since the dark ages before the internet, documentation that I had an education, more envelopes, more books, documentation that the IRS knew I inhabited the planet, power cords, more envelopes, things without names, still more books (especially the one on music and mathematics that I always thought I’d read someday and actually understand), a scalp massager, all sorts of gadgets and tools, still more envelopes and scraps of paper and notes – I’d like to give a full accounting but think it would prove more exhausting than informative, a bit more depressing than identity-reinforcing. The savings and detritus from nearly three decades must be cautiously considered if a person is to remain sane, soulful, and accomplish an impossible and perhaps ill-advised target of listing of house for sale by April 28th, 20COVID. Courage and a surgical mask are not sufficient. A carefree attitude is required lest the sinkhole that is the first two-thirds of an average American lifetime open up and swallow the unsuspecting, semi-civilized human traveler, regardless of the soundness of his pre-existing physical and mental health.

There is more than just time lurking beneath beds, above cabinets, and under the dusty cushions of furniture. There is emotion. There is hope and disappointment, aspiration and agony. And there is the knowledge that this, all of this, all of it, with me and everyone I know, too shall pass.

A baby boomer born in Philadelphia who stands on the precipice of change in the midst of an unseasonably warm northern Arizona spring day does not allow himself to become morose in the face of such weighty and potentially immobilizing reflection: he fires up his chain saw and trims some trees. He trades the chain saw for an ax, ridding the ground of visible stumps from past trees poorly planted, chosen, or nurtured. He fills the extra large garbage container with sticks, weeds, and decaying wood. He takes a car full of old paints, varnishes, stains, and other unused chemical concoctions that would likely fail contemporary safety standards to the hazardous drop-off center at the county landfill. He donates whatever is within reach and is not saved by instinct or a clear note from his wife not to give away. He finishes his day by finding just the right screw lying amidst a box of old screws, nuts, and bolts that helps secure a hasp on the sliding barn door.

Then he sits in a simple chair, his feet in the sun. He softens his gaze out freshly cleaned windows onto a garden that grew alongside his children. He does not remember. He just watches a jay swoop from a budding tree for a sip of water in the birdbath. He watches his mind decide that it’s time he learned the names of more birds. He awaits the next butterfly that will flutter by. He lets his crossed legs cause first one then the other to fall asleep. He himself does not sleep. He simply breathes. He feels what it’s like for a spirit to smile. He marvels at the inexplicable mix of signals, energies, and souls that move within a single human form.

Time is a single point stretched across eternity. And tomorrow that point is called May 3rd. Maybe someone will call the realtor for an appointment to see this house.