How bad days become brilliant.
Last Saturday we were having a house showing. Our house isn’t even on the market, but our former real estate agent will send city folks to see our place every now and again if they want a massive century home that takes 4 hours to clean. Prepping one’s house for a showing has to be amongst the things I despise most in life. David always states: “We will not do anything special, the house isn’t on the market, they’ll just have to cut us some slack.”
I just can’t. It has to be more than clean, more than just tidy. It has to look pretty. It has to be inviting. It has to say “Look, aren’t I a beautiful home? Wouldn’t you want to live here?” I can’t ‘haphazard’ it before a house showing – I CAN’T! I ‘touch-up paint’ the freaking kitchen cupboards, I fold my visible sweaters in the walk-in closet, if putting a sprig of parsley in the kitty litter was a sign of clean kitty litter, I’d do that. Having a house showing stresses me the fuck out.
Which is why, when I was tidying our bedroom and noticed that David’s t-shirt drawer in the dresser wouldn’t close, it made me mental. With slumping shoulders I pulled the drawer out to look inside the dresser to see if there were internal reasons why the sucker wouldn’t close. I looked at the back of the drawer and saw that the floral drawer liner paper that I’d placed in it years ago was askew and was bunching out the back of the drawer. I tugged on it once and the freaking drawer fell apart on me! Its antique bottom fell completely out. Panicking, I clutched the drawer’s contents to my chest. Thousands of t-shirts against my bosom with no fucking clue as to how to just shove them back into the drawer and then cram said drawer in the dresser and pretend that nothing had happened, because stupid-ass strangers were going to be coming to our house in mere fucking minutes!! Rage welled within me; angry tears on the periphery. I dropped the drawer onto the floor and began adjusting those fucking t-shirts.
A glint of something caught my eye. A silver chain. Its appearance caused me to literally catch my breath. There, amidst the well-worn cottons of my spouse, was part of my broken heart. A coloured glass pendant on a chain, my most treasured gift from my late friend Shannon. Strike that. Not ‘late.’ Dead. Shannon is dead and although she was often ‘late’ in life (a fact she, herself, would freely admit), calling her ‘late’ in death seems to homogenize her dying. Sugar-coating it doesn’t help, she is dead. Missing her is a part of my life.
I had been searching for the pendant for months when I had assumed our cat Lola had stolen it (I think I might have to report my cat to Interpol). Lola must have pushed it off the dresser into the slightly open drawer beneath. The pendant’s reappearance, at any time would have been a happy discovery, but at this particular moment, it was miraculous. My impending tears of rage did a complete 180 and I found myself laughing and crying in complete and utter joy. I fastened that chain around my neck, feeling the weight of the pendant against my chest, and recognizing that a piece of my heart, missing for months, was now once again present.
My craptastic morning turned ecstatic in an instant. Me… so stressed and anal about tidying up the house, so worried about shit that nobody cares about… If I hadn’t cared, that pendant would still be in that drawer, lying in wait until we eventually moved from this house and David had to finally go through those t-shirts. And although I would have greeted his discovery of the pendant, probably years from now, with spectacular joy, I’m glad that I found it myself, and I’m glad that I found it in juxtaposition of doing stupid-ass tidying up. Little things can and do mean a lot. I have definitive proof.
