The Art & Poetry of Mary Coleman

It was my second week of living in Portland after 11 years of being away. My dad was dying of cancer and living with my uncle so I was to take over his old house. He’d been there alone for about 6 years since my mom died and had not cleaned it once in that entire period, while slowly filling it from floor to ceiling with his crap. I would say he was a borderline hoarder (this man had like 15 of everything).

My first goal when I had visited a week earlier was to get the house somewhat cleaned so I called in a professional cleaning crew to do a deep clean as best they could around all his belongings. Though they were able to get the bathroom and kitchen somewhat liveable, the rest of the house was just too covered in crap to access all the surfaces and floors. My goal the first day back was to clear the bedroom and make a room I could sleep in. The sheets on the bed were so worn through there were holes in them so I found some fresh sheets and a clean blanket and made the bed. It’s something my mom always told me to do when you are feeling like cleaning is too much. Just start with the bed. And that is what I did.

I designated the second bedroom as a storage room to start off with. Putting all the crap in it from the bedroom I was sleeping in was a start. I was finally able to see the floor and surfaces and do a clean of them. The house was so full of dust I had a sore throat from breathing it in. My mom’s old cleaning supplies were intact so I was able to use those. The rags I made from an old sheet were black. The vacuum seemed to work okay, thank god. It had probably not been turned on since my mom had used it.

The next day I showered in the clean bathroom and made some breakfast in the somewhat clean kitchen. There was still mounds of belongings piled on the kitchen table and all around it so I ate in the bedroom. My goal for the day was to clear the kitchen and living room and once again store all the crap I didn’t know do with in the second bedroom. That would all eventually end up in the attic when it was time for my husband to come over and live with me there (he was in the process of getting his green card at the time). We would need the second bedroom because it was bigger and could fit a bigger bed. For now though, it was the designated dumping area.

It took all day for me to clear out the living room and the dining area of the kitchen. I also went through the drawers of the kitchen and vacuumed random bug carcasses that had piled up inside them. I’m not sure what was previously living there to leave so many dead remains, but I found no live bugs thank god. Whatever the infestation had been, it was not current. Blissfully I only encountered one spider the entire clean. It had been something I was concerned about going in there, how many spiders had moved into the crevices of all the crap piled up.

By the end of the day breathing in the house (with the help of opened windows) was better. My sore throat remained, but it cleared up a few days later. I had a living room, a kitchen, a bathroom, and a bedroom to inhabit. The next day I would tackle the bedroom in the basement to use as an art studio. This was a little easier because he hadn’t been able to get up and down the stairs much due to his bad back so there wasn’t as much stuff piled in the downstairs bedroom as there was on the main floor.

Eventually we put all his accumulated belongings in the garage and just closed the door and left it. Because we sold the house as is (it wasn’t in good condition) without inspection, we included a clause that allowed us to leave most of what was there in the home after we left. The new owners were not aware of this until the day before we vacated and the panic in their eyes when they realized they would have an entire house of crap to deal with, was very evident. I felt a little bad, but it also felt good to leave all that stuff behind and start a new life in a new house without any bad feelings attached. The memories I had of my parent’s house were not good ones and the only positive thing I can say about it is that its sale allowed us to have a sizeable down payment on our current house. There was no way we could have ever bought a home otherwise. Not with Portland’s prices.

The home we have now is a happy place for me. There’s no trauma in the walls. I wanted to live in my old neighborhood because that was the one good thing about my parent’s house, it was in a great neighborhood so I really wanted to stay within it. So we moved about 6 blocks away. Still two blocks from Laurelhurst Park, but a little further from the shops and restaurants. They are around .70 miles away from me now and they were about a third of a mile from my old house. Still not bad. The big grocery store is more of a car ride away though. There’s a few much closer and easy to walk to but they are really small and too expensive to get a week’s worth of groceries at. Plus a week’s worth of groceries requires a car anyway. It’s the only drive I have to do for which I am grateful (I am an incredibly fearful driver).