sentimental fool
The last time I took out and dusted everything that was boxed, shelved and bolted in the house was 10 years ago. More or less. During said major clean-up my husband and I found out that the termites had burrowed into one plank of wood underneath the spiral staircase that lead to the attic, and feasted on one box-full of my books from my political activist days.
Since two weekends ago, the house has been figuratively turned upside down due to major renovations done on our upstairs flooring. We had our old floor boards dismantled and laminated wooden ones layed down. The old floors which were cheap and not intended to last a lifetime had thinned out and in certain places threatened to cave in. The termites are back, we found out during the re-flooring. They managed to go through a meter of floor support that somehow escaped being doused with anti-termite compound during the construction of the house 17 years ago. This time the casualty is one big box of old documents, mostly from my days as a rural development and agrarian reform researcher, and also all the remaining hardbound volumes of Lenin's Collected Works that escaped the first infestation. The only volume I now have from the original set of 45, which I split with two close friends is no. 41 which contains Lenin's various documents, speeches, and communiques written between 1896-1917. Of the full set, the one I feel sorry to have lost is no. 37 which contains Lenin's personal correspondences.
The re-flooring took only 4 days, but sorting our stuff continues and will probably take one more week to finish since I am a slow worker. Being part of the consumerist middle-class, my family has accumulated tons of stuff and as my daughter has pointed out, it's not easy to throw things away. So far I've thrown out 4 busted electric fans, one radio/cassette tape player, one extra-large garbage bag full of knick-knacks and doodads, and another extra-large garbage bag full of work-related papers and documents that managed to escape my zero-paper policy since I started working from home in 2001. Later today, the kids are supposed to clean and re-shelve their books and weed out the ones that they feel they can part with to donate to the community library. I'm sure this will be in fits and starts since my children really loves books, and also because the eldest is still awake and watching some "jdorama" on her laptop. Then there are the four huge plastic crates of old clothes which I want to tackle this Monday.
Clearing and cleaning one's accumulated possessions sometimes yield treasures of the sentimental kind. This is the part of major clean-ups that I like, when some long-forgotten piece of junk stirs the murky bottom of your memory or prompts new insights about yourself and others. Of course when this happens, said piece of junk acquires the value far beyond pearls.
Found and saved from the termites and the junkyard people:
1) Hand-made birthday cards from my daughter - It's good to be reminded that most sullen teens used to be sweet kids. This is what she wrote me when she was 11 -
we have a mathematical mother named pi
she knows that her name means 3.14
but let me ask you, could she bake a pie?
no, not even in Home Ec when she was a teen
(not even today either)
2. Unfinished attempts at writing fiction from the days when i was nursing my eldest - The short stories are atrocious, I'm not surprised that I've forgotten they exist. They are however, revelatory of the state of my mind in 1987, when I was suddenly a young mother, disenchanted from left-wing radical politics, constantly squabbling with her man who refuses to duck and evade threats of extra-judicial killings by both the Left and the Right.
3. Forgotten field notes - I did a lot of traveling in-country during the early half of the 90s as a researcher. Having since filled out three passports, I suspect I've grown almost blase with long-distance travel. I've forgotten that I used to maintain meticulous field notes that covered not just the work i did but stuff both mundane (expense breakdown, to-do lists, etc.) and not so mundane (hurl-worthy encounter with a freeloading local media person). My field notes are written in 5"x7" spiral notebooks, and i suspect the lot of these notebooks were in the box that was lost to the termites. One of the notebooks that I managed to save contains quite involved notes from my first solo field work in Negros island in September 17- October 7 in 1992.
4. Letters and printed emails - I used to be a mean letter writer. By letter, I mean hand-written, sealed in an envelop and properly stamped. I found a sheaf of computer print-outs of letters I wrote to friends in the late 80s to early 90s, around the time when I shifted from long-hand to using a word processor but before the advent of email in my country, and when i was still deeply suspicious of computing and digital information. Thus, the printing of documents. I also found print-outs of long and involved emails to friends during my first few years as an Internet newbie when everyone was still using pop mail, Hotmail was not yet owned by Microsoft, Yahoo was still only an indexing service, and the Google engineers were probably still in Uni or maybe even high school.
But of course my love affair with letter writing extends to affairs of the heart. My letters to J, first when we were still going out and then later when we were newly hitched are not the typical love letters. Practically all my letters to him were written after major tiffs and quarrels. Where most people would have rowdy make-up sex, the me that was twentysomething wrote letters. Did I mention I am a freak?
Since two weekends ago, the house has been figuratively turned upside down due to major renovations done on our upstairs flooring. We had our old floor boards dismantled and laminated wooden ones layed down. The old floors which were cheap and not intended to last a lifetime had thinned out and in certain places threatened to cave in. The termites are back, we found out during the re-flooring. They managed to go through a meter of floor support that somehow escaped being doused with anti-termite compound during the construction of the house 17 years ago. This time the casualty is one big box of old documents, mostly from my days as a rural development and agrarian reform researcher, and also all the remaining hardbound volumes of Lenin's Collected Works that escaped the first infestation. The only volume I now have from the original set of 45, which I split with two close friends is no. 41 which contains Lenin's various documents, speeches, and communiques written between 1896-1917. Of the full set, the one I feel sorry to have lost is no. 37 which contains Lenin's personal correspondences.
The re-flooring took only 4 days, but sorting our stuff continues and will probably take one more week to finish since I am a slow worker. Being part of the consumerist middle-class, my family has accumulated tons of stuff and as my daughter has pointed out, it's not easy to throw things away. So far I've thrown out 4 busted electric fans, one radio/cassette tape player, one extra-large garbage bag full of knick-knacks and doodads, and another extra-large garbage bag full of work-related papers and documents that managed to escape my zero-paper policy since I started working from home in 2001. Later today, the kids are supposed to clean and re-shelve their books and weed out the ones that they feel they can part with to donate to the community library. I'm sure this will be in fits and starts since my children really loves books, and also because the eldest is still awake and watching some "jdorama" on her laptop. Then there are the four huge plastic crates of old clothes which I want to tackle this Monday.
Clearing and cleaning one's accumulated possessions sometimes yield treasures of the sentimental kind. This is the part of major clean-ups that I like, when some long-forgotten piece of junk stirs the murky bottom of your memory or prompts new insights about yourself and others. Of course when this happens, said piece of junk acquires the value far beyond pearls.
Found and saved from the termites and the junkyard people:
1) Hand-made birthday cards from my daughter - It's good to be reminded that most sullen teens used to be sweet kids. This is what she wrote me when she was 11 -
we have a mathematical mother named pi
she knows that her name means 3.14
but let me ask you, could she bake a pie?
no, not even in Home Ec when she was a teen
(not even today either)
2. Unfinished attempts at writing fiction from the days when i was nursing my eldest - The short stories are atrocious, I'm not surprised that I've forgotten they exist. They are however, revelatory of the state of my mind in 1987, when I was suddenly a young mother, disenchanted from left-wing radical politics, constantly squabbling with her man who refuses to duck and evade threats of extra-judicial killings by both the Left and the Right.
3. Forgotten field notes - I did a lot of traveling in-country during the early half of the 90s as a researcher. Having since filled out three passports, I suspect I've grown almost blase with long-distance travel. I've forgotten that I used to maintain meticulous field notes that covered not just the work i did but stuff both mundane (expense breakdown, to-do lists, etc.) and not so mundane (hurl-worthy encounter with a freeloading local media person). My field notes are written in 5"x7" spiral notebooks, and i suspect the lot of these notebooks were in the box that was lost to the termites. One of the notebooks that I managed to save contains quite involved notes from my first solo field work in Negros island in September 17- October 7 in 1992.
4. Letters and printed emails - I used to be a mean letter writer. By letter, I mean hand-written, sealed in an envelop and properly stamped. I found a sheaf of computer print-outs of letters I wrote to friends in the late 80s to early 90s, around the time when I shifted from long-hand to using a word processor but before the advent of email in my country, and when i was still deeply suspicious of computing and digital information. Thus, the printing of documents. I also found print-outs of long and involved emails to friends during my first few years as an Internet newbie when everyone was still using pop mail, Hotmail was not yet owned by Microsoft, Yahoo was still only an indexing service, and the Google engineers were probably still in Uni or maybe even high school.
But of course my love affair with letter writing extends to affairs of the heart. My letters to J, first when we were still going out and then later when we were newly hitched are not the typical love letters. Practically all my letters to him were written after major tiffs and quarrels. Where most people would have rowdy make-up sex, the me that was twentysomething wrote letters. Did I mention I am a freak?