Perhaps the ferocity in a dishpan was mine. I stood at the sink in my father's old home, my birth house, my childhood home, the only one I ever lived in until off to college and beyond, returning over the years, watching it diminish, him diminish, first my mother disappeared, then the cat, then the plants that couldn't take neglect, then finally it all. It all had to go.
I stood at the sink washing each teacup slowly. Deliberately. He had died only two weeks earlier, and the day before, I arrived at the house to find a dumpster in the driveway, and my brother's new stepson and friend chucking old furniture and clothes and molded curtains into it. The refrigerator in the laneway, the one collaged with wine bottle labels from cottage dinners, my mother's grand and lovely way of retaining happy memories of good times with family and friends, that old broken refrigerator that had stood for twenty plus years in the driveway beside the red brick wall of the old small suburban home, just standing there, being, not really causing any harm to anyone except those embarrassed by rundown things, it was now chucked. Unceremoniously into the dumpster. Like a lot of things will end up, I suppose. For who in their right mind mourns an old refrigerator?
When I found a few minutes later that they had already chucked my mattress, the bed I slept on when I came to visit, my little refuge in the far corner of the house, I lost it.
Like my mother I left. In silence I left. In a rage and a storm too furious to speak, I left. I drove first to the falls, where the river diverges alongside the canal, and there I sat and wept. And thankfully the water raged in its winter glory, smashing and tumbling across and down the rocks, acting out all the ferocity my world needed at that moment.
When I returned the next day they were gone. The house had been left for me to mourn in peace. They had noticed. Or perhaps I had even requested it. I don't recall.
Graced the one day to sort and sift through old things at my own pace, alone, I did what anyone in their right mind would do. I washed teacups. For hours. Each single and beautiful teacup, speckled with roses or lilies or violets, each with its special flowers, its unique design and history, its matching plate, I washed the dust and the neglected years off its body and revealed its singular beauty. Its shine.
Where did they come from, these delicate bodies, these relics of slower times? My mother told my sister who once finally told me. From girlfriends. They'd exchange teacups as birthday gifts. Or to honor a graduation, or the birth of a child. An important life event. So after I washed all these teacups I hand delivered them, leaving them on doorsteps, with notes, or using them as an excuse to get in a visit with every single friend of my mother's, twenty-two years after they'd seen her last.
(Note: The title of this piece comes from 2 different poems written by Molly Peacock and published in her collection "The Second Blush")
