dust
One looks down several dozen feet into the ground to view ancient Roman ruins under the modern Italian cities we've visited like Rome and Verona. On our last trip, what I found most puzzling, what I was most curious to know was whether the old cities had sunk or if the earth's dust had built up on top of them.
The excavation in progress at our apartment in Brooklyn gives me a giant clue. Yesterday we took down all the drapes in our apartment from the windows and the passageways where we had divided the big endlessly rectangular loft into separate "rooms" with several eleven-foot-tall panels of thick fabric. Years of hanging without a thorough cleaning in a loft next to one of the busiest intersections in all of Brooklyn, finished off by a final year where our attention has been on purchasing and renovating our new place, gave these drapes a thick coating of dust that looked like Morticia Adams (or was it Lily Munster) had been there with her dust-blower. It was embarrassing, even without anyone else seeing it. I went to bed last night with a dry head and dry eyes. I blew black gunk out of my sinuses in the shower this morning.
But yesterday, perched high on the ladder, as I handed each dusty panel carefully down to Bob, who took them from me gingerly and headed for the stairwell, my view down on the ruins of what was our Brooklyn apartment helped me better understand excavation sites. I imagined the same layer of dust that is currently covering everything in our apartment multiplying and getting pressed down over a couple millennia, to the point that, someone in the year 4006 will be standing on top of it, from pretty much the same height as I was on the ladder, looking down in at the petrified versions of the tables, chairs, and utensils that I was seeing from above.
Yesterday, as we continued to unearth our belongings for sorting and packing, I saw back through the layers, back to eleven years ago: I visualized the apartment as it was before we swathed it in fabric, back when I took the first pictures of the vast space and drew a floor plan to take home to show my parents. I remembered where we put the Christmas tree each year and how it grew in size and number of ornaments. I found the tieback hooks for the first curtains we hung in the windows, cheap ass synthetic "lace" that was replaced by real drapes a few years later, the drapes Bob and I took to the roof yesterday and shook and beat until we could breath around them again.
Later in the afternoon, Bob dusted off the piano and sat down to play a little from memory since his sheet music is already packed. Suddenly there he was, the man I fell in love with some sixteen years ago, playing music as he did for Christmas parties and on summer evenings while I painted or wrote so many years ago.
As bitter sweet as this is, it is good to knock off the dust and pull back the drapes from our lives. It is good to excavate what once made our house a home.
The excavation in progress at our apartment in Brooklyn gives me a giant clue. Yesterday we took down all the drapes in our apartment from the windows and the passageways where we had divided the big endlessly rectangular loft into separate "rooms" with several eleven-foot-tall panels of thick fabric. Years of hanging without a thorough cleaning in a loft next to one of the busiest intersections in all of Brooklyn, finished off by a final year where our attention has been on purchasing and renovating our new place, gave these drapes a thick coating of dust that looked like Morticia Adams (or was it Lily Munster) had been there with her dust-blower. It was embarrassing, even without anyone else seeing it. I went to bed last night with a dry head and dry eyes. I blew black gunk out of my sinuses in the shower this morning.
But yesterday, perched high on the ladder, as I handed each dusty panel carefully down to Bob, who took them from me gingerly and headed for the stairwell, my view down on the ruins of what was our Brooklyn apartment helped me better understand excavation sites. I imagined the same layer of dust that is currently covering everything in our apartment multiplying and getting pressed down over a couple millennia, to the point that, someone in the year 4006 will be standing on top of it, from pretty much the same height as I was on the ladder, looking down in at the petrified versions of the tables, chairs, and utensils that I was seeing from above.
Yesterday, as we continued to unearth our belongings for sorting and packing, I saw back through the layers, back to eleven years ago: I visualized the apartment as it was before we swathed it in fabric, back when I took the first pictures of the vast space and drew a floor plan to take home to show my parents. I remembered where we put the Christmas tree each year and how it grew in size and number of ornaments. I found the tieback hooks for the first curtains we hung in the windows, cheap ass synthetic "lace" that was replaced by real drapes a few years later, the drapes Bob and I took to the roof yesterday and shook and beat until we could breath around them again.
Later in the afternoon, Bob dusted off the piano and sat down to play a little from memory since his sheet music is already packed. Suddenly there he was, the man I fell in love with some sixteen years ago, playing music as he did for Christmas parties and on summer evenings while I painted or wrote so many years ago.
As bitter sweet as this is, it is good to knock off the dust and pull back the drapes from our lives. It is good to excavate what once made our house a home.
1 Comments:
This was a bittersweet and touching post.
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