We recently spent almost a week trying to get started cleaning out Russ’ parents’ house in the Northwest suburbs of Chicago. When my mom passed away, we didn’t have to do this. The doublewide on the God-forsaken Hill had been abandoned and was my sister Sarah’s property, and Sarah was living where Mom had been living when she died. Going through someone’s earthly possessions is taxing. There are memories and energy attached to almost everything you touch. I think it was much harder for Russ and his sister, Elise, than it was for me. I didn’t have those childhood memories from Swedish Glee Club or the Swedish Lodge. I didn’t have the memories of what had come over from Sweden with Grandpa Gust, or what had been made by their maternal grandmother, Gran. I didn’t remember who had done what, with everything, since I was a child. It was a lot for them to deal with, I could tell. Being Scandinavian, there’s a tendency not to show emotion from them. I’m mostly Scots Irish, though, and I show every emotion I have. The night Elise told me she had found a Christmas present in the closet for me that Sandy had already bought, I kinda lost it. She asked if it would be okay if she wrapped it for me. Because she would want it wrapped if she were me. Another day we were talking about Christmas gifts, and she said something to the effect that there wouldn’t be many for her this year, and I choked up then, too. Sandy went to yard sales and thrift shops all year long collecting little odds and ends for each of her kids, me included, and put them all in a stocking for us and mailed it to us for Christmas. In all honesty, it was rarely anything I needed, but I always loved unpacking it, seeing what she’d found that made her think of me, what she’d found to brighten my day on Christmas. Sandy was like that. She was a light-lighter. She was the type of person who just brightened everyone’s lives by being there. Always a kind word, a joke – even if it was at her own expense – and she loved us kids with every fiber of her being. She bought a sweater at Torrid in January when we visited because I bought one. They were out of her size, so we ordered it, but it arrived the day we left, so we never had the chance to wear them the same day. We had hoped to this coming winter. You never plan on the next season not coming. I brought the sweater home. If I ever lose these last fifteen pounds, it should fit me. If it doesn’t? Maybe I’ll give it away. I just couldn’t let it go to Goodwill. It was my one moment of “No, that’s Sandy,” that I couldn’t let go of.
She had also stacked journals and reviews on a bookshelf that had my work in them. I don’t know what I’m going to do with them. Possibly see if one of the local libraries might like them? I have no room for them here. Somebody, someday, would just throw them away here, too. I’ve seen the future, and I need to clean my own house. I need to make a will. I need to do so many things. There are no promises of the next winter, the next season, one more trip to visit and catch-up, one more letter, one more hug. There are no guarantees whatsoever. That’s what cleaning out Sandy’s and Art’s things reminded me about.
We made about ten or eleven trips to Goodwill in under a week. There’s still one room we haven’t touched and two or three others with desktops and dresser tops to finish clearing off. There’s still paperwork galore that Elise and Russ are working on. We plan to meet again Mother’s Day weekend to try to finish those things, so we can get started on getting an estate seller involved and clean the actual house so it can go on the market. It’s honestly daunting how much is still left.
But we did make time for some time-honored traditions while we were up there. We had Nancy’s Chicago-style deep-dish pizza. We went to Ikea, where we shopped and had Swedish meatballs and enjoyed looking at all the Christmas stuff they had. Russ and I went into Andersonville, the old Swedish section of Chicago, where barely anything Swedish still exists, and made a stop at the Swedish American Museum to buy some Christmas ornaments and Bondost, a soft Swedish cheese. Then we discovered a new place, on the outskirts of Andersonville, called Paulina’s Market, new only to us – it has been there since 1949 – and found more Bondost and some other deli items that struck Russ’ fancy. Having a few things to look forward to was good. It helped alleviate some of the heaviness of the trip. And there was plenty of heaviness. Here’s hoping we can make more headway in May and get things settled before the turn of 2025’s calendar pages.
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