column 11/25

Nov. 25, 2004

Dear Adams family,

DC and I know someone who hides the valuables when a certain relative comes to visit. Things seem to disappear when she leaves.

We don't need to take those kinds of precautions with our relatives. We just have to figure out how to make our house appear inhabitable. Three dogs with bad habits and two humans who can't brag about their own make it a challenge.

The first step is to close the door to the middle bedroom and move something heavy up against it so that a curious sister-in-law would actually have to try to see inside. Inside the disarranged room are the unneeded, but not unwanted, leftover objects 11 years of marriage can produce -- especially if the partners in the marriage suffer from the inability to throw things away.

I will admit to a mild case. Every letter and card anyone has ever sent me resides in various drawers in our bedroom and boxes in the basement. Also stored are letters I wrote but never sent -- the psychological implications of their existence still tantalizing me -- and shirts that quit fitting 20 years ago. In my world it's not whether you can still wear a shirt that's important, it's what it represents: Maybe a pilgrimage to the Stone Pony nightclub where Bruce Springsteen got started or a red satin goodbye gift from an old girlfriend.

In India, holy men in rags wander the countryside with nothing, depending on the kindness of others for food and shelter. Their success is a measure of their holiness.

"Learning to live is learning to let go," writes Sogyal Rinpoche In "The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying."

It will be just as hard for me to let go when the time comes for the dying part.

DC is worse. The middle bedroom, the basement, the back porch, our closets, her pickup truck, all are repositories of her unwillingness to let go of almost anything. Every Christmas she insists I not buy her anything because responsibility of finding a place to put bears on her (I do it anyway).

The next step to a successful holiday was to have the understanding woman who cleans our house come by twice in one week. It helped. The answer to our quest for a normal home appears to be a full-time house cleaner.

DC herself cleaned out the front bedroom. Where all the clothes and bundles and sacks went is a mystery I don't want explained.

The relatives will arrive at the door wondering what to do with the two wires sticking out of the hole where the doorbell should be. In the foyer, the teenagers might wonder why there's a stained glass window depicting Jesus Christ and in the living room be confronted by large images of a Hindu goddess and an American Indian.

That's our decor, traditionally unconventional.

There will be dark stains on the wooden floor our house cleaners couldn't do anything about, signs that DC loves a little beagle on diuretics who will never be housebroken even more than she loves our house.

This is home.

Robert Frost said, home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.

Just give us a little warning.

Love, Sam

Sam Blackwell is the managing editor for the Southeast Missourian.