When Life is a Shit Show

leaning into the unbearable lightness of being.

Is having a colonoscopy when you are purging your home of 30 years too obvious of a metaphor?

Make it fun and add cancer treatment, floor refurbishment, and a family emergency, all in the same week. Plus, a high-stakes election.

Call it The fine art of stress-bundling.

I am writing this from one of the few safe rooms in my house, with my agitated elderly dog-with-a-heart-condition on my lap trying to protect me from the nice men who are ripping up the flooring almost everywhere, except the spaces where we’ve stacked furniture, appliances, and a piano. The rain is pouring down, so the only place I can comfortably be outside is in my car. I am preparing for a colonoscopy.

When we move to Portugal, we will Air BnB our Seattle house. The design and property management experts have insisted we make some cosmetic updates and we are dutifully complying, even though this is definitely not our forté.

It’s helpful to be married to an engineer at a time like this.

But shortly after our friend G helped him do the heavy lifting and crazy furniture configuration, J was called away on a family emergency. The pets and I hunkered down, me still a little buzzed from the Benadryl I was given during cancer treatment earlier in the day, eating ramen on the floor and watching episodes of the latest season of My Brilliant Friend, trying to figure out how I’ll get to the hospital at 6:30 am and who will bring me home. Once again, G to the rescue. UPDATE - also S to the rescue. See you tomorrow at 6 am!

I was going to tell you about the purging. About what it feels like to relive the nearly three decades I’ve lived in this home - the family I raised here, the writer I became. And about the decades of international travel before that, which are represented by the art on the walls, the furniture, and the photos in the attic. And the cookbooks. I was going to tell you about the bittersweet experience of letting go of my cookbooks.

But right now, all I can think about is something my friend MB said to me the other night, when I called her in despair after our best laid plans abruptly changed. “You are moving along on a path towards a goal and then something happens to upend it. You deal with it and get back on the path. That’s just life.”

I calmed down, laughed, and evoked Nora Ephron.

The other day, I met with my oncologist for the last time during my year of active cancer treatment (she’ll be away when I finish in December, so I’ll meet with her nurse-practitioner instead). We talked about “survivorship” and the path forward, which will involve diagnostic screenings every six months for the next five years, and the symptoms I should pay attention to.

I have to admit, I got a little weepy thinking about that path. About embracing a full life with J in Portugal, marked by openness, adventure, appreciation, and also a practical dose of vigilance.

But let’s get back to talking about purging stuff and how great it is to have younger family members who offer to give it a good home.

On the day the purge began in earnest, my older daughter came over to empty out her bedroom, but she spent most of the time on my bed, admiring jewelry, jewelry boxes, scarves, and Thai silk and Indian brocade garments. I told her the stories of how I had come to acquire each thing and reveled in this mother-daughter bonding.

I had expected to feel emotional, so I made a pear clafoutis to soothe my soul.

During the years that I lived in Asia, cultural appreciation had a decidedly consumerist bent, hence the clothing, jewelry, furniture, and artwork I amassed. My daughter oohed and aahed over these treasures the same way she had exclaimed over the vintage Frye boots I gave her.

She was wearing three pieces of the jewelry I gave her, along with the boots, when we went out to dinner with visitors a few weeks later. A week after that she sent me a photo of herself at a fancy soirée, bedazzled in several pieces of my finery. It warmed my heart.

Meanwhile, there was a constant stream of visitors to pick up items I’d posted in my Neighborhood Buy Nothing Facebook group, trips to the consignment store, a nasty attic cleanup by J, and several dump and Goodwill runs.

The car we have been nursing along, which just needs to last another few months, threatened to die while I was stuck in a long Goodwill donation line. It was my third attempt to donate that day (our neighborhood Goodwill is notorious for unexpected closures during donation times) and I was hellbent on doing the handoff. I did, and slowly crawled home, where the car engine promptly gave out.

Just another deviation from the path.

You know who appreciates the papier maché lamps I got at Suffering Moses in Srinagar, Kashmir, India? My brother-in-law and his girlfriend, that’s who. They also love the Thai celadon vase and the little brass figurines that represent a classical Indian music troop. In fact, they love two big boxes of my mementos, which they shipped back home to Michigan.

Purging stuff that was once meaningful to me is so much easier, knowing that it is going to family members who will make these things meaningful in their own way (or throw them out and not tell me).

I could see J breathe a sigh of relief as I jettisoned stuff much faster and with much less nostalgia than he feared. I was surprised too.

For so long these exotic treasures represented a life I had once lived that I thought was essential to my identity. I wrote a book about my painful transformation from peripatetic world traveler to minivan driving stay-at-home mom. For a long time, I needed these relics to prove to myself that I was interesting.

But I’ve matured and done some living and some traveling since then and am about to embark a new international adventure. Hanging on to souvenir tchotckes doesn’t seem so important anymore.

Now let’s talk about the cookbooks. Remember that scene in Annie Hall in which Alvy and Annie have different perspectives on their sex life?

Well J and I have different perspectives about how many cookbooks I got rid of. The dining room table was piled high with books I’d offered in our neighborhood Buy Nothing Facebook group, but he looked at what remained on the shelves and shook his head.

Later, when I made the painful decision about which books would immediately come to Portugal (only around 30, not the 50 I anticipated wanting to bring) and which books would remain in storage (okay, four very full and very heavy boxes, but still...), I was proud of my restraint. J had a different viewpoint.

“I guess these cookbooks represent years of repressed travel,” I said pointedly.

Before and after (plus four boxes in storage)

The nicest cookbook story happened here on Substack.

Lynn Hill

let me post in the Foodstack Library chat that I had my mother’s vintage collection of Time-Life Foods of the World books to donate to a good home. A woman named Katy in Upstate New York responded right away and a few hours later, the books were on their way to her.

Being alone in a torn-up house doing colonoscopy prep on Halloween is not the time for self-reflection.

At some point, I may want to examine my relationship to stuff — I haven’t even told you about all the clothes I’ve given away and consigned, which reflect body image issues, the chasing of an ideal, a susceptibility to marketing (looking at you, French Girl Summer), and the fact that I really appreciate fashion.

Maybe I’ve been a cultural capitalist, a repressed housewife, and an easy target for marketers. Maybe I believe that a thing of beauty is indeed a joy forever and that life is better when you cook interesting meals and dream of the places they originate from. Maybe I’ve just lived a full and messy life in a house with an attic.

Either way, I have new aspirations to be a European minimalist and a vow to never again wait nearly 30 years before purging my stuff.

What’s your attitude towards stuff and its relationship to your life? Do you hang onto things or purge regularly? Please share your perspective in the comments.

The Best Thing I Cooked This Week

Green Chili with Hatch Peppers from allrecipes.com

In the midst of all the purging and chaos, our oven died. It got fixed, then we discovered a gas leak, and so it is waiting to be fixed again.

I’m so glad I made a big crockpot full of this delicious chili, which I could store in a cooler once the refrigerator got dismantled, heat up in the microwave once the gas got turned off, and pack up for J when he quickly had to head out of town.

Ah, the slippery slope of life.