page again.
Because of the nonstop rain, by noon it was as dark as evening. The walls in the living room had swirling forest green wallpaper Claire had installed last year, which only contributed to the lack of light. I walked around the house, flicking on lamps to try to brighten up the place. I found persistent rain comforting, as if it insulated me from the outside world.
"I have an adventure for us," Hugh said, coming out of the kitchen with a box of garbage bags in his hand.
"Are we burying our enemies?" I asked.
"Ha, you are just so funny." He chucked the box at me and I caught it with both hands. "We're finally going to conquer the storage room."
Claire had been relentlessly bugging Hugh for months, ever since our May yard sale, to clean out the room full of junk across from my bedroom. Claire's plan was to donate most of the stained stuffed animals and ill-advised fad footwear to the local thrift store, and turn the room into her own personal exercise haven. A little pile of weights and a yoga mat waited in the corner of the main basement room, for the day when the treadmill would finally be uncovered.
Hugh grabbed a stack of broken down moving boxes he had brought in from the shed. With me in front, we headed down the basement stairs. I flipped on the light switch in the storage room. There was hardly any room for us to stand inside, but we managed to squeeze in.
My grandparents, Claire's parents, died in a car crash two years ago. When that happened, much of their belongings came to us. Corinne had picked through what she wanted, and then left it to my mom to dispose of the rest. Claire had a hard time parting with much of it, and there was a lot to part with. My grandparents had been wealthy, and Grandma Eleanor collected antiques on the verge of hoarding.
Much of it had ended up going to auction. But a third of the delicate china and lacey linens sat here, collecting dust. I knew part of the reason Claire wanted us to take care of it was so that she wouldn't have to go through the emotional work of deciding what to give away.
Hugh was busy putting together one of the boxes and setting it on top of an unsightly, chipped end table.
"Where do we start?" I asked him. He looked as overwhelmed as I did.
"Wherever you want," he said. "Just start. I want to get it done today. Considering how you and I operate, if we quit in the middle, it'll never get finished." I knew he was right about that.
We set to work, digging through boxes and bags, and taking out garbage and donations to the main room. The charity pile began to grow, and after an hour had passed, we could move more freely in the storage room little by little. Like my room, there were no windows inside, and it was musty. Puffs of dust whirled up like spirits whenever we moved a box.
"Good lord, there's carpeting," Hugh remarked when he discovered a swatch of blue on the floor. "I had no idea." We looked at each other and laughed. It felt good since we hadn't done it in so long.
A rack of old clothing was crushed against the back wall. Hanging on rusty wire hangers was a baby blue tuxedo that I assumed had belonged to my grandpa, and a few sweaters with shoulder pads and color vomit that moths had nibbled.
"Everything on that rack can go," Hugh advised me. "In case you can't tell."
He helped me navigate the wheeled time machine out into the hall. I pulled a sticky cobweb off of my palm.
"I'm glad we have a van coming to pick this up. Otherwise we'd never get it out of here," he said, surveying the little mountain of junk that had accumulated.
"Do you think everything will fit?" I asked. It was an awful lot of our crap.
"We'll make it fit," he said determinedly.
Taking the rack out made a significant dent in the room, a full free corner. Nearby, I found some loose photographs in a box, of Claire and Corinne as kids. They are fraternal twins, but in the pictures, they were dressed in matching outfits. I watched them grow older as I flipped through the photos, morphing into their current personalities.
Claire looked fashionable for the time with a perm and short jean jackets, while Corinne's