Morning of a new summer month in Seabeck. From the kitchen window I can look out across the little portion of water in front of the town proper. The hills are dark, almost black instead of the green they are supposed to be. Above them thick slate grey clouds hover, imposing their hue on all the Earth below. A spotlight of sunshine directs my eyes to the foreground where two red cats sprawl on the deck like satisfied seals sunning themselves on a bare rock. One is grooming his belly with a hind leg outstretched from the cedar planks at a perfect 90 degree angle. From here, the three of us can watch the sky swallow first the land, and then the sea, but it appears that two of us are indifferent to the the metamorphosis across the way. I want to take a picture, capturing the dissonance between the color-drained distance and the brilliant reflection of sunlight on red fur, but I have no film.

Today would be a good day for me to stay around here, allowing the haunting thoughts to hover over and consume me like dark clouds. The rain does wash away the dirt. Again, my sincerity has allowed me to look like a fool; a hazard, I guess, of being someone who acts always with honest intentions, even if the motivations are not logical. (Careful not to confuse Irrational and Illogical with Deceit or Manipulation.) I do trust too much, allowing my heart to let it tell its contents. I don't want to learn to be cynical just because honesty is too easily exploited and always being the honest one means the exploited one is often me. Cynicism is not an inherent quality of mine. Even when my mother tried to tell me her cancer had metasticized (to yet another region) I remained the optimist: Maybe the treatment will work... So, I guess it's unlikely, after that colossal let down, that I'll ever be the cynic, the fatalist. Still, I feel it tugging at me when, again, a trust is betrayed. I suppose, though, that it's better to open my arms and trust, and then expel those who fail to recognize the value of honest faith and/or take advantage of it. That sounds a lot like that trite and useless statement: Better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all. That one is too passive (loved and lost), denying agency. Besides not being restricted to love at all, mine is more empowering and gives the trusting one the ability to reject and claim her own self worth.

That was this morning.

The cloud cover lifted and so did I. Gathered up my gear and made the long, slow, grinding drive in the MF to Puyallup where I opened the chasm that is our storage room. Organize. Somehow, with our crap, Dave's brother's crap, and the crap my uncle tossed in there from when my G-ma moved, everything had gotten just piled into one huge mound that crumbled like that one game - what is it? - Jengo, whenever I attempted to retrieve something. It was time to pull it all out and re-pack.

There's all this stuff in there now that was my mother's. It had been stored at G-ma's house and when she suddenly moved this May, all of that was stuffed into boxes and given to me. All kinds of random stuff, I discovered. All kinds of things through which I must sort now because it's just junk and not real momentos. Do I really need her cancelled checks? Broken things? My old shoes from Jr. High?

Anyway, I couldn't do all that in one day, so I managed to open every box, take quick note of the contents, and then place it into the storage room on either the side I have to sort through, or the side I don't.

Some boxes contained things I couldn't quickly pass by. I found myself sitting on a short box in a concrete hallway of closet doors holding a lock of my yellow-blonde hair, remembering the day my mom took me for my first haircut. The woman with the shears simply chopped the long ponytail off just behind the Goody hairband with huge blue bulbs. There it was still, doing its job to keep each blonde strand in place this many years later.

I found her car keys. Her pocketknife, which I dropped into my pocket. There was a box of loose photos containing many images of her; I grabbed it and brought it with me.

In my own packed and sealed boxes (which I opened to take inventory) I found my yearbooks. Grabbed those too so that I can use them for the reunion page. All my old diaries were stacked together. I took the whole stack and started reading. I became frustrated that I didn't write with more depth, that I wasn't more in touch with my feelings. I found myself in the difficult position of trying to read between my own lines: What was I really feeling when I wrote this thing? But events are recorded, and I can see already how re-reading will help me construct more accurate time lines than my memory can do. I grabbed them all and brought them, along with the pictures and yearbooks, home to examine.

It was surreal to fold back into my childhood while sitting on a box in a long hallway of doors. Visiting these tender places in my memory, discomforted by the coldness of that place. I started to feel those odd sensations again of being outside myself and looking in at the accumulation of experiences, all of which seemed to (and have) led precisely to the moment I occupied at that time, which was a hallway of doors. (How did I get here??) I looked down from above and saw myself as a hub, out from which extended distinct phases of and experiences in life, which were contained along the circumference in an orbit of sealed boxes. I could travel back through time, not linearly, but jumping through the center into another era. It was hard on the soul, to do this. The mind doesn't want to remember so much pain in a sequence contrary to what it is prepared to defend against.