Five

I think I only had four days worth of things to say.

Also, I don't particularly care for the number 5.

That makes this particular effort in 30 days of writing particularly awful.

Sorry.

We are away this weekend, staying in a rented house. It is really very lovely, a house where everything appears to be on purpose. It's very soothing to be in a house where there the extraneous is extricated.

The owners have no children.  And maybe a storage locker somewhere else full of all the shit family members have passed along over the years? Surely to God there's a storage locker.

Where else does all that oppression go? How do people find ways to get rid of the items a parent or grandparent thought worthy of treasuring? My whole soul needs to get rid of it all, but I. Can't. Not the christening dresses kept for 100 years. What would happen if this rogue daughter-in-law was the one who left them at the Sally Anne?? or my grandmother's purse? It's awful, but it's from Birks and it has a blue silk lining and it was still here once she was gone.

The bitch of it is, I know better. I KNOW that sentiment is useless, that the purse has none of Grandma in it, that I know her no better keeping it. Lord knows those christening dresses are doing the world no earthly good packed into one of the downstairs closets.

Watching families run from the fires in Alberta this week, none of them are staying behind to load up Christmas decorations from 1942, or stashes of cards sent from friends, circa 1987. They are grabbing their people, their passports and maybe a computer if there's time.  They may find themselves missing the clay pigeon handcrafted in kindergarten back in 1977 or maybe pining for the tea cups and saucers a grandmother (which one?? I don't even know!) collected over the years. But probably not so much. Probably they will miss knowing they were home and that they were safe a lot more.

When we get home, I will probably declutter a room, or a drawer. But it probably won't be enough.

There's no perfect ending to this post... I warned you. It just ends all cluttered up like this.