The Secret of the Two Red Coffins

The timing was bad.  What a time to have to leave town!  We’d just had water flood damage days earlier and had to move all the furniture from the dining room and my bedroom into the living room and sewing room. 

I pulled up soggy carpet and padding and found black mold – on the flooring beneath the carpet and on walls behind book shelves and desks.  We sprayed a bleach solution on all the wet and moldy surfaces and ran fans ‘round the clock for days on end.

And in the midst of all this, I was called off to Idaho to help my older sister, Jenny, pack up her entire household to be ready to move out by Sunday, the 31^st.  (She’s going back to school in another state and renting out her house for the next two years.)

But bad timing on unexpected trips to Idaho at the call of my sister was nothing new.  

In the midst of the Los Angeles riots in 1992, I got a call from her when her husband of two years was hit and killed by a train.  She called and I came running then, too. That's just what family does.

This time, when I arrived in Coeur d’Alene to report for packing duty, very little had been done.  She was somewhat overwhelmed.  And we were often interrupted by meals with friends who wanted to see her before she moved away.  We had just three and a half days to do it all.

I set out to be as helpful as I could be, packing boxes full of bedding and dishes; taking photos off the walls and bubble wrapping them to store them away safely for moving.

Together, we packed up boxes of books to donate to the library, and a couple of boxes of fabric to donate to a quilter’s guild.  She was doing really well at parting with old, unused stuff.

With time at a premium, we were knocking things out at record speed.  But each time the subject of her bedroom or the garage came up, I noticed she’d put me off.

The stuff in her bedroom was mostly papers and stuff that she had to sort through herself – some of which was still in boxes from the last move - home stuff mixed with office stuff.

And the garage – well, it was the garage.  Hers was huge!  And she had parked her one car in there, with the rest filled with the stuff of life: 
canoe, kayak, power tools, table saws, snow blowers and lots of just old, dusty stuff. As garages go, though, it wasn't terribly over- packed at all.

We had to have everything boxed up before her volunteer friends from work came to help load the U-haul in the morning to haul everything off to the two storage spaces she’d rented.

And by Friday evening, we were down to the bedroom and the garage, I was pretty much stumped.  She kept putting me off.  

I could understand the paper-sorting being a one man job, but I could easily tackle the garage.

But I know that packing up your entire life and moving out of state to go back to school is a traumatic life experience.  So I was trying really hard to tread lightly and not to press her, even as the deadline bore down on us.

I could clean out the back room where she was going to store what tools and such she planned to leave behind, and then move that stuff in.

 

Then I could tackle either packing up or marking for “give-away” the rest of the garage stuff while she worked on the mountain of paper sorting in her room.

But she started getting all weird on me.  

Don’t touch that....  We can’t do anything until the back room is spotless....  

(It is a furnace room/potting shed/pass-through to the back yard, for goodness sake!!)   

She actually wanted me to vacuum the concrete floor!

Are you kidding me?!!!  I was running out of energy this late in the game, and patience too.  My back was killing me and I was going on less than 5 hours of sleep for a week now.

She had to be crazy!  With all we had left to do, everything had to come to a standstill so I could vacuum the corners of a storage shed?!

The more I tried to talk reason, the more agitated she got and dug in her heals.  So, with my asthma being what it is, and her vacuum kicking out a musty odor, I suggested she might do the vacuuming while I got things ready to move into the room.

But, no.  The tools (rakes and shovels and hoes) couldn’t go in the back room until I took the trash can that would hold them out into the back yard and scrubbed it down inside and out with soap and water…

Jenny, it’s just a trash can, and it’s not that dirty!  

All we’re going to do is put dirty garden tools into it and put it into a back room where it will get dusty and bug-inhabited anyway, I thought.

She blew up at me.  And I decided it was easiest just to do what I considered the ridiculous, and get on with it rather than waste time trying to talk reason. 

All I could hear was the tick…tick…tick… of the U-haul-loading countdown.  

Well, that and the increasingly noisy sucking sound of the last of my limited energy being flushed down the drain.

But understanding the enormous amount of stress she was under, I grabbed the trash can, some Dawn dish washing soap and an old broom, and begrudgingly set about my insane assignment. 

And with it all cleaned out, I helped her to sort through the forest of gardening tools, paring down to the essentials.  

She really didn’t need four shovels, five rakes and three sledge hammers.  We slated 2/3 of them for give away and stored the rest – rakes, hoes, shovels and sledge hammers.

With that done, she went back to work sorting papers and I came back into the garage and tackled the shelves.

Eventually, as I got down to the last bits and pieces and odds and ends, I had to call Jenny back down from her bedroom.  Now what?

She was still  irritable and unable to focus, flitting from one thing to the next and accomplishing nothing.  

For me, it wouldn’t be surprising behavior, but it was really strange for her.  She is usually very opinionated.

“Okay, now what about these?” I asked her, indicating the long, narrow, red crates that had been buried behind the gardening tools and under piles of other odds and ends.

And that’s when the light came on - the real reason we were vacuuming gardening shed floors and scrubbing perfectly acceptable trash cans to store dirty garden tools.

This wasn't about papers or tools.

“I don’t know what’s in those,” she said, suddenly fidgeting anxiously.  “Those were from the logging site and were in the back of John’s truck when he died….”

And we stood there, staring at these two, red coffin-like boxes.  Five or six feet long by a foot and a half by a foot and a half.

“So you’ve been dragging them around all this time without looking inside?” I asked incredulously.

My big sister stood there, the look of a small girl being scolded on her face. 

I had no idea she had been hanging onto these things all these years.  Jenny’s just not the sentimental, emotional type.  And John died nearly twenty years ago, for goodness sake!

As the realization came over me, I felt badly.  

“Well, that’s easy to remedy,” I said, trying to lighten the mood.  I stepped over the long pile of moulding on the floor and reached for the opened lock on the top box.

“I don’t know what’s in there,” she repeated, anxiously.  “I’ve just never gotten around to looking in them.”

I opened the lid on the top coffin-like crate, carefully watching for black widow spiders, and there it was….

Not the body of Jimmy Hoffa.  Not B.D. Cooper’s fortune.

Just more garden tools!  

Just another box full of rusty, old, scarred and broken hoes and shovels and rakes and sledge hammers!  We both had a good laugh, breaking the tension.

She breathed a sigh of relief, and in the end, it was all very anticlimactic.  We just closed the lid and decided not to do anything with them at all.

We would just leave them where they were, and if the new tenant (a friend of hers) didn’t like it or needed the space, he was welcome to throw them out.

A good deal of the foot-dragging and anxiety and stupid demands (like vacuuming  storage sheds and scrubbing trash cans to fill with dirty gardening tools) stemmed from her fear of facing what was in those two coffin-like chests.

She could have been shed of them two decades ago, had she just been bold enough to face them head on and take that peek inside.  

But instead, she had dragged them through her life for nearly twenty years and at least two house moves.

And so it is, so often in life, for most of us.  We drag along our own caskets filled with fear.  

And over the years, if we don’t deal with the fear, it grows and multiplies until we find it takes over half the garage of our lives in toxic red coffins.

We were up until after midnight packing boxes, and got up at 5:00 a.m. to finish it off before we had to pick up the truck at 9:00.

Her friends were lifesavers (because by that time, my back was in ruins and I could lift only the lightest of boxes.) 

There was a glitch in the plan when Bob and I got to the third floor of the storage facility with four dollies filled with boxes only to find the storage space they’d assigned us to, was already taken.  

(The other mover friends sat in the back of the truck relaxing while I took Jenny to the office to straighten it out.)

 
We got everything out of the truck and then up to the 3rd floor of the storage warehouse. 

And in the levity of completion, we got a little silly, racing the dollies back down the hall to the elevator!  When it was all done, we returned all the dollies back to their proper places on the first floor. 

Then we went back to Jenny’s so the help could all join in a cold beer.

U-Haul

No miracles today... Well, it was almost a miracle. 

I almost wrote about this last week, but was just too darn tired.

But last Thursday was the big moving day. I picked up a U-Haul in Riverside and met my son, Nick at the Riverside house where I've lived with my sister the last three years.

Things were complicated by the fact that my sister will not let anyone in her house. So the furniture and boxes from my room I had to wheel out myself on the dolly.

That was enough to wear me out.

Then came the boxes full of memories. Box after box out of the garage. A box of old Halloween costumes I made for the kids when they were young. 

I thought maybe this year we could give them away, but they brought out the sentimental side of Nick.

Next came the box of photos and photo albums. Wedding photos - a reminder of days of bliss and naiveté. Photos of my girls, smiling and innocent, hugging their mother who loved them. A reminder of simpler days. Box after box of Christmas decorations - each a reminder of someone or some event.

Then of course came my drawers and drawers of fabric - which I will soon be able to use when I start making my quilts once again (something I am soooo excited about doing!)

And last, but not least, my antique drafting table made of cast iron and oak.

The thing weighs a ton, but is really a thing of beauty. And just so perfect for designing my quilts on!

By the end of the afternoon we were all exhausted. Every muscle in my back burned with fire.

And I could not be more thankful for my dear, loyal Nick. 

He did the majority of the lifting, with me helping him here and there with the really big things.

He lifted and carried and organized and packed the van with precision.

And he only grumbled a couple of times. But he stopped when I gently reminded him that his dear old mom is actually a middle-aged woman now and no longer the super woman she used to be. (I think that might have been a revelation to him.)

With everything packed in, I had Nick drive the U-Haul truck back out to the road (as we had to drive over the curb to avoid the low-hanging branches on Patty’s beautiful crepe myrtle tree.)

He expertly maneuvered around the rock retaining wall, over the curb and parked it in the middle of the street, facing down the hill. He put on the emergency brake and hopped down.

“Okay, mom. I need to buy gas, so I’m going to go down to the gas station and I’ll meet you there.”

He left in his car and I climbed up into the U-Haul truck and tried to release the brake. 

Nothing. 

I thought maybe I wasn’t pushing hard enough since that was my sore knee and I had a knee brace on. 

I pushed again. 

And again.

Nothing.

I tried it in drive, in neutral, with the engine off, the engine on… Nothing!

So I called the 800 number on the rental agreement to ask what I was doing wrong. It rang forever and then I was put on hold for five minutes. In the meantime, people are driving around me, honking to let me know I am in the way - duh!

Finally, the woman comes on the line and tells me I have to press the brake all the way to the floor to release it. Told her it was done, but to no avail.

“Okay. Did you try it in neutral?”

I put it in neutral and tried again. Nothing.

“That’s okay. There’s a hand release, but it is hard to find. If you get down out of the truck and look under the console where the steering column goes under the dash, you’ll see it up underneath. It’s kind of hard to find…”

“Okay, I am out of the truck, but I don’t see it…”

She waits patiently while I duck my head between the seat and the console and feel around for the hidden release.

“Aha! I see it!”

“Okay, pull that outward and the brake will release.”

It did. But guess what! The truck is still in neutral! 
It lurches forward and takes off, rolling down the steep hill, gaining momentum by the second! 

That first, sudden lurch sends a tearing sensation down the muscles of my lower back and in that second I knew I’d be in pain by the morning.

I had one hand on the door and the other on my phone. 

In the flash of a second, I hear her asking, “Did that work?” as my brain is registering that the truck is now rolling down the hill at quite a clip!

Running along, my hand on the door, I reached up with my phone hand, and grabbed at the steering wheel (the bottom of which was about level with the top of my head) and the truck swerves to the left (where I am) and toward the left side of the road.

I am running as fast as I can - still holding the phone! - and realize someone in an SUV is trying to pass me on the left and I am about to collide with them (with me in between the vehicles!) 

And I am still running and still holding the phone…

I grab at the bottom of the steering wheel, calculating quickly and aiming for the 5:00 position. But the truck now veers toward the right side of the road where a half dozen cars are parked along the side of the road in front of houses. Somehow, in my panic, I miscalculated. (Go figure!)

About this time, I am thanking God that I paid the extra $28 for the million dollar insurance coverage - and inexplicably, I’m still holding the phone!

My legs are giving out as the truck continues to pick up speed and each stride is longer and faster. 

I’ll never make it! I am running and trying to steer the truck so that it at least stays in the right lane, but not too close to the parked car - and amazingly, I’m still holding the phone.

I can hear bits of the woman’s voice on the other end of the line… 

“Are you there?  Are you okay?  Hello..?”

I realize if I can at least keep it in the center of the road I at least won’t wreck anyone’s car. And providing that I can make it across the road at the bottom of the hill where our street dead ends into the Sierra Vista, I will only crash into the church office building.

Hopefully nobody will get hurt. I’ll let go of the truck before it gets to the crossroad, just in case. 

And again I think to thank God I paid the extra $28 for the million dollar insurance coverage - and I’m still holding the phone!  

But only because it's in the same hand that is trying to hold onto the wheel while I try not to let my feet get dragged under the truck!

I don’t know exactly how it happened, but somehow I miraculously found myself in the shoulder-high driver’s seat, my heart racing so fast it frightened me more than the runaway truck.

I had mustered every ounce of strength I had and launched myself at the wheel, pulling with both arms (as my legs were now basically just flapping along behind me on the pavement trying to keep up as we barreled down the hillside.)

Scrambling across the bench seat, I fumbled to get my now exhausted and somewhat numb feet into the floor of the truck and stomp on the brake.

The truck finally, against all odds, comes to a stop about four or five houses down the hill from our original position, and believe it or not, I’m still holding the darn phone!

The woman on the other end asks, “Did you find the hand release?”

I had a rising urge to laugh hysterically, but somehow I refrained. 

After a couple of gasping breaths, I gasped, “Yes, I found it. Thanks!” and hung up.

I sat there for several moments just trying to gain my composer and catch my breath. The phone - which I’d finally dropped onto the passenger seat - begins to ring, and with shaking hands, I pick it up and answer.

“Mom, where are you?!!”

“Uh…I’m just getting ready to leave.”

“What’s taking you so long?”

“Uh…I just had a little trouble with the emergency brake, but it’s all good now.” My voice is shaking.

“Are you okay?”

“Uh…yeah…I’m fine. Pam needs gas too, so we’ll be there in a couple of minutes.”

And with a sigh of relief and a prayer of thanks, I finally put the truck into drive and call the day a success.

I’ve found that the road through life is seldom what you think it is going to be. 

Sometimes the brakes of life keep you stuck in a place you don't want to be. 

And sometimes things travel faster than you’d planned. But if you just hold onto that lifeline as you run down the hill of life, doing your best to keep on the road, things will turn out okay.

So here’s to another Friday night, and my son who carried most of the burdens, and traveling down memory lane and being able to remember the good times and let the rest just remain behind….