surprised there was still more boxed up in here. Was my father a closet Amazon Prime addict or something? Had he been having a sordid affair with the Home Shopping Network? Wait, was that even still a thing?
Anyway.
We got to work, and we took it one box at a time. That was really the only way we could do it, since Will had no idea what needed to be kept or discarded. He was, however, great at organizing the things I’d already been through, and having a second pair of hands made it a hell of a lot easier to move heavy boxes and big pieces of furniture.
Dad had a few trillion boxes of books, and between us, we stacked them off to the side where they were out of the way. This had also been where he’d stored furniture that apparently didn’t fit—physically or aesthetically—into one of the other rooms of the house. Given the monstrosities occupying those spaces, that said a lot. By the time Will and I had moved a creaky antique chaise lounge, a dresser so heavy I was sure it was full of concrete, and at least ten different pieces of miscellaneous furniture down to the garage, we both needed to take a break for some water.
Then we hauled our aching bodies back upstairs, and the mess didn’t look quite so discouraging now. It looked less like the back room of an abandoned secondhand store and more like a place someone had stashed a few boxes of odds and ends. Or a few dozen boxes.
Will bagged or boxed up trash and took it downstairs so it was out of the way. We also assigned one empty box to each of my siblings, and if I came across something I thought they’d like, it went into the box.
Will went through some boxes too, sorting out the obvious trash (anything badly broken or mouse-eaten beyond recognition, for example) so I could go through what was left. It was actually really helpful, too. There were some boxes that he didn’t remove anything from, and some that were so full of unsalvageable trash that he’d pull maybe two or three items out and stick them in one of the other boxes waiting for me to sort while he discarded the rest.
From time to time, one of us found a piece of childhood memorabilia from me or one of my siblings. No clumsily-assembled art projects or anything like that, but if Dad considered something an accomplishment, he considered it valuable, and even after his death, his house still held dean’s list certificates and both academic and athletic awards from high school. I didn’t see anything relating to my artistic pursuits, but I supposed that wasn’t a shock. Dad hadn’t considered painting, drama, or ceramics to be of particular value. Ironic, given how much money he’d shelled out for the results of other people’s skills in painting, drama, or ceramics, but they were worthless for his kids to pursue.
And people wondered why I had so many issues.
The boxes of Christmas decorations were tough to sift through. The holidays hadn’t been bad in our house. Dad loved Christmas. Loved it. That had been the one time of year when he would get truly festive, from full-size Santa displays in the front yard to Christmas lights twinkling all the way around our roof and along the fence lining the driveway. Selecting our Christmas tree was always a big family occasion, and so was decorating it. And I was pretty sure the happiest memories I had of my father were on those Christmas mornings when we’d wake up to thick snowdrifts outside. He’d even build snowmen and have snowball fights with us.
As I pulled some familiar glass ornaments out of a box, I couldn’t help smiling past the sting in my eyes. My childhood hadn’t been all terrible. My memories of my dad weren’t all bad. Something told me the holidays were going to be hard this year. It wouldn’t be my first Christmas without my dad. It would just be the first without any possibility of a future Christmas with him.
The glass ornaments had always been Maryann’s favorite, so I put those in the box with her name on it. Then I took out another box, this one containing a set of bubble lights. The box was a little warped from time and moisture, and the insulation around the cords didn’t look so great—cracked in some places, nibbled in others.