the tinyblog

Sometimes you just don't know what you're getting yourself into until you're there. Sort of like taking a bunch of hallucinogens or something. You're like, "Oh wait, I thought this was gonna be..."

A week or so ago, Rzan asked me if I would come to the old house with her. The lawn needed to be mowed and the house needed to be cleaned. I wasn't living there when she moved out, but we had lived there together for almost two years, so I figured I'd be weasel to say no. So we said I'd come over Saturday and help her.

In true tiny fashion I had remembered that I had offered to help her with something that day, but I couldn't really remember what. I mentioned to Ben that I was going over there on Saturday and he handed me a bag of zip ties.

"Here," he said, "I guess you're going to be hooking up her stereo."

So that overwrote the old RAM in my brain, and that's what I thought I was going over there to do. When I showed up on Saturday she said, "Hey, Jane already mowed the lawn, so we just need to clean the house." Oh yeah, my brain thought.

And strangely enough, it was a little like doing hallucinogenics, walking into that nearly empty house with nothing left in it but memories. We pulled out sponges and buckets and began to wash down every surface. I started in the bathroom. It was nasty and it took a long time. We hadn't thought to being any kind of music (there had always been music there, we didn't even think there wouldn't be, like somehow it would emanate out of the walls). So I just started singing, and all I could think of were wracked songs of broken love. I must have driven Zan crazy, belting them out in the bathroom like a passionate nightmare.

Finally we went for fresh sponges and shower curtain rings and came back for a second shift. After doing most of the kitchen and bathroom we could tell there was a lot of work left. That's when it was most strange, washing all these rooms better than we had ever washed them. Zan felt it too and asked what would be a good mantra for cleaning a house.

So we just started howling mantras, filling up the whole house, even though I was almost constantly out of breath from singing loud and scrubbing thick scuff marks and wax and greasy fingerprints from the doors near the doorknobs and shit that got spilled behind the bookcase in the kitchen pooled and left for dead a long time ago. We scrubbed and sang until our whole heads vibrated.

It was pretty surreal, like I didn't realize what I was going to be doing that day, holding some kind of strange closing ceremony over 11015 27th Ave NE, scrubbing inches worth of child growth off the hallway door and pulling the "H" and the "A" from the old "HAPPY" from above the kitchen, like a message to me from another universe.

Eventually we realized we were wrapping it up and felt like we had made the place ready for the next people who would live there. I hope we did. There was a lot of intense emotion in that house. Also an amazing heart breaking amount of love and cooking and entertaining and naps and dance parties.

My props to Zan for her good sportness. We sat down on the couch and she cried and then we went to get hot food. I wished I could have cried, but somehow there was release anyway. I'm glad I have such a good friend as her, some people you just know you're connected to across time and space.