Friday, August 5, 2016

Emptying Out the Old House


Most of the furniture in my family's house was finished by my father, who painted everything with wood stain. He sanded and polished and stained it again until it had the right look for faux-Swedish modern furniture of its time, namely the 1960s. You'd think that people would be lining up to grab these relics, but the home-interior world is overrun with this kind of woodwork now that the old generation is dying off and the houses with their contents are being dismantled. The emptying of the old house for me is being repeated all over the USA. I have no idea whether it is happening in other countries. A vast mountain of STUFF is being moved elsewhere. America is moving mountains!

Meanwhile, my father's hard work, some of it pervaded with mildew and must and mouse leavings, was taken to the junkyard, where I had to pay a fee for leaving it there. My helper who did the hauling said that junkyards sometimes allowed "pickers" to salvage things from the dump. So it may be that someone has taken my family's cabinets and bookshelves and home offices and folding tables and chests of drawers into their own households. Maybe they've purged the mildew and polished up the faded stainwork. I would like to think that's happening. They can have the cat-scratched cabinets and the sofas with the mouse seed caches and the chairs with the spindly metal legs I always tripped over and the fake Oriental rugs made in factories. Works for me, yes it does.

Black ink tech pen on sketchbook page, 5"x 5", July 26, 2016.

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