COMMENTARY: A Few Hammered Nails and an Identity Returns
By Sharon RandallScripps Howard News Service
I keep staring at what was, only yesterday, a spotlessly clean, monastically bare wall.
Amazing, isn't it, what a difference a few thousand nail holes can make? My husband did it. I helped. We barely fought at all. Maybe it's true what my grandmother used to say that absence makes the heart grow forgetful.
Two months ago my husband and I flew to Las Vegas of All Places and rented an empty house, which we then furnished as best we could with a bed, a TV, a few cups and plates and a cheap set of patio furniture.
Then I left him in the desert to start his new job while I flew back to California to pack up the house where I had lived for more than half of my life.
Moving out of that house was not the hardest thing I've ever done, but it came pretty close.
I survived it with the help of family, friends and a surprising number of readers, who offered words of encouragement and advice: ("Get rid of anything you haven't used in the past year." "Don't get rid of too much or you'll be sorry later." "Let the movers do the packing." "Don't let anybody pack for you." "Never pack booze; invite the neighbors over to drink it, but do not under any circumstances let them pack.")
Nobody bothered to tell me that packing isn't really hard; it's unpacking that kills you.
For days now I have been digging through boxes like a cat in an Olympic-sized litter box. I hope to finish, with any luck, before my funeral. Or at least before the first snowfall, which in the desert is like saying before hell freezes over.
Speaking of heat, it was 105 here today in the shade. And there wasn't any shade.
But at least my husband has been trying to help. Yesterday, for example, we hung pictures. I pointed to where they should go. He hammered the nails. We started with a watercolor of Mirror Lake in Yosemite (a parting gift from his parents to remind us of California) that fit perfectly above the fireplace.
Then we hung an old cross-stitch I've loved for years: "To everything there is a season and time for every purpose under heaven -- Ecclesiastes 3:1." We put family pictures on a table in the dining room, hung a painting of the house we left in California and tacked a red metal sign on the wall in the kitchen that reads simply "Eat."
Finally, when I wanted to quit, he went into my office and began covering a wall with reminders of who I am -- photos taken at various stages of my life with people I hold dear.
As a centerpiece, he used a collage my daughter had made from dozens of snapshots showing me with her and her brothers, from the delivery room to the college graduations. In every photo, my hair was a different color and style. It looks like a catalogue for cheap wigs, but it will always be my favorite.
Around that, he positioned other favorites: My children at various ages, my parents and their parents, my late husband at a basketball game, my sister in a bikini, sleeping spread-eagle on a beach surrounded by our snickering cousins.
Finally, at my insistence, he added a snapshot of himself playing bass guitar; and one he took of me sitting in a rocker on a porch by a lake in North Carolina, in the mountains where I was born.
They're just a bunch of old pictures but -- like the man who had the sense to hang them in my office -- they remind me of who I am and where I've been. And somehow in ways I can't explain, they shine their light on every dark road I take.
Maybe tomorrow I'll unpack my suitcase.
Write Sharon Randall at P.O. Box 777394, Henderson, NV 89077 or e-mail to randallbay@earthlink.net.