Greetings, friends. (XLVII)

Greetings, friends. Today I canceled my flight home.

The reason why is, simply, that there is still an unknown amount to do in my mother’s house in New Hampshire, and we now have a deadline: April 6, which is when the realtor brings her photographer. Once she has the photos in hand, the house goes on the market.

So I still plan to return to Portland, of course, but not before the house is ready to be photographed, and that means, basically, getting rid of everything in it. Sure, we can have tidy furniture type items in the photos, but basically everything needs to be out.

Now we work backwards through the dependencies. To be photographed, the house must be cleaned, which means hiring cleaners to come to the house after (almost) everything is removed. That has to happen no later than April 3 or 4, just to give us a couple days, in case.

As I have mentioned, Adah and I are keeping relatively few objects from the estate, meaning we must sell, donate, or dispose of the rest. The final stage, then, is disposal, where we hire someone to cart away whatever we have not sold, donated, or discarded by that point. Hopefully, whatever remains will have enough value to offset the cost of hauling it away, but, regardless, the disposal must happen no later than the weekend of April 1st.

What remains at that point will probably be largely housewares, furniture of little to no value, and the treadmill upstairs. That treadmill is keeping me alive right now.

Since I’m not going home this week, I will not be participating in the Portland Shamrock Run, alas. So, yesterday, I let Hal Higdon know that my sights are now firmly on the Brooklyn Half-Marathon in May. Hal (and, by “Hal,” I mean, his app) chided me gently for starting a little late on training for a half-marathon, and then gave me a training plan that starts about where I’m already at, except that the weekly base runs are now 3 miles.

I would not be able to train in New Hampshire for a half-marathon ten weeks from now, were it not for that treadmill, which my mother purchased a dozen years ago to train for our hike to Cape Alava, and which has sat largely unused upstairs since. The treadmill is keeping me alive right now. It seems fitting.

Even the running itself feels like a metaphor. I have to keep moving, but I have to pace myself to get to the end. I just have to get to the end of the run.

Final liquidation of the contents of the house before or during the weekend of April 1st gives us three weekends, between now and then, in which to sell the belongings we don’t want to keep or donate. Except that Adah and Keith are away the week of March 25th, so that really gives us two weekends, if Adah is to be involved. And she knows a lot more about the worth of what’s in this house than I do.

The “donate” pile is a surprisingly large one, since it includes virtually all of our mother’s replica re-enacting garb and accoutrements, which are far ranging. Most of this stuff has no value to anyone but historical re-enactors, to whom it in some cases has considerable value. Along with these, there are massive piles of hoarded textiles et cetera from which to make more. Currently these items, arranged for review, take up the entirety of the living room and dining room.

Adah and I have enlisted a coterie of Mom’s close friends whom we call “The Ladies” because that is what they are: Sandy, Colleen, and Alena. These three were active collaborators in our mother’s historical research and re-enacting activities. They were also very devoted to her, in spite of having to put up with her usual bullshit.

I think this is because Mom was a fountain of knowledge on topics that interested them, and, as I think I have said, she was unsparing when sharing that knowledge with a willing audience. So some of my mother’s friends express a reverence for her talent and her generosity that sometimes jars alongside my recollection of her as a troubled person and a deeply flawed mother. I feel as if I go cross-eyed in my mind trying to focus these two very different images of her into a memory of a single person.

Today Adah and I are the beneficiaries of the Ladies’ gratitude towards our Mom, because they are helping us make sense of what is left, and finding good homes for much of it. This is a task that has consumed, and will consume, many hours of time between now and April 6, and I am grateful for their assistance.

The reason why is that Adah and I have agreed that, after wrapping this up efficiently and not wasting too much value doing so, our joint desire is that our mother’s likely wishes be honored as closely as we can reasonably imagine them.

I mean, she’s dead, so we’re doing our best, up to the limits of our imagination and time and capacity and comfort. If Mom had more specific desires she wanted honored, she should’ve left better notes.

At the least, we do want her historical replicas to go where others will use them for their intended purpose. The Ladies know to whom and where much of this stuff can go. I’m hoping that they will cart away and use much of it themselves.

Adah and I decided we don’t want to do an “in-home” estate sale, at least not one open to the public. I think we both feel like it would be kind of tacky. But after the antique dealers and the furniture dealers and the architectural salvage guy come through the house and the barn, there’s going to be plenty left of value, much of it still highly niche.

So we’re hosting a few “open house” days for friends of our late mother, and anyone else the Ladies choose to invite, bless them. Hopefully we can find good homes at steep discounts for her less-valuable antiques, specialty books, ceramics, furniture, et cetera. This has to be over the next two weekends because there is no other time. It’s all got to go somewhere.

So that’s what I’m going to be doing for the next month. The clock is ticking. The antique, furniture, and salvage dealers mostly still have to be booked, except for one that Adah has done well working with. One has flaked. Another came and looked at the barn, and then called later to say he didn’t want any of it. I called the estate consignment liquidator that our realtor recommended at first, and he thanked me but his eldest son had just gone into hospice with stage 4 cancer. May God bless and keep his family. I hope we can find another liquidator in time.

If you’re reading this, I send you my love. Ceterum censeo pro vigilum imperdiet cessandam est. More tomorrow.