Holidays

Jerry and I weren't huge celebrators of holidays.  We had the tree and the menorah in December, but we didn't exchange gifts then.  We gave each other gifts on our birthdays, but not on our anniversary, which was instead the occasion for homemade cards (usually involving penguins - like the card from our 10th anniversary this past St. Patrick's Day, which is sitting on my nightstand, and is signed "the Luckiest Hubs Ever!").  We usually got chocolate around Valentine's Day, but it wasn't a surprise and we usually discussed where to get it from (I still have most of two bags of Cowgirl Chocolates truffles, one of them the spicy ones Jerry liked, from this past February, when, by Valentine's Day, we were only two weeks past Jerry's diagnosis and probably into his radiation treatments, and he had no appetite).

Now, when holidays come, they're just unhappy days like all the rest.  Memorial Day was spent at the hospital, over two weeks since Jerry had been admitted.  If I remember right, it was very dark and there was a heavy downpour that day.  The 4th of July was only a few weeks after Jerry died.  And today is just another day that he's not here.  But also the end of summer, in many ways, and the gateway to darker, colder, bleaker days.

I cleared out those two rooms in the basement that had had tools and supplies in them, crying a lot through the whole process.  I have no idea what most of the tools are for (an answer to the question "Why won't Karen be looking for a job as a cabinet finisher?" - because I didn't learn near enough about cabinetmaking to work with anyone other than Jerry), and I don't know what Jerry meant to do with so many tins of nails, except that I guess carpenters keep nails just in case.  (Upsetting is the fact that a lot of nails are in tobacco tins - Jerry quit smoking long before I met him, but there's no way of knowing whether or not the years of smoking had anything to do with the cancer that killed him.  It's possible.)  I don't know why he was keeping a lot of what was down there.  And I even found boxes of unused vinyl tiles from previous owners of the house - I can't even remember which floors had vinyl tiles on them, the kitchen?  The downstairs bathroom?  What on earth am I going to do with all this stuff?  Eventually I'll post some of it on Freecycle, I guess.  And someday, if it doesn't all get taken away one way or another, I may have to rent a dumpster.

I found a small pile of samples of tiles and surfaces that we used in the kitchen - the red ceramic floor tile, the accent tile on the wall and the sand-colored backsplash behind the stove, a piece of the brick-colored Fountainhead countertop we used in both the kitchen and the downstairs bathroom.  Lots of tears over that.  I still remember deciding on what we'd use, I still remember late nights in the kitchen, before we moved in, helping Jerry in the backbreaking work of laying the floor tiles.  How did I get from there, a happy new wife, to here, a shell-shocked new widow?  How did the time between rush by?

Anyway, the rooms are cleared out, there are piles of things in other parts of the basement, and somehow that I can't imagine, the guy with the big mixer truck will pour the walls down there.  My fond hope is that it'll get done while I'm away next weekend in Atlanta and Alabama.

Laundry is mostly done, too, so it's been a productive day.  I do hate to mention how long it's been since I gave any of the rooms of the house a good cleaning.  Someday...