How do you get away from the thought that all you write will be read?  Even the journal renderings?  And how to stop the background taunt that it is this thought that restrains what you let flow to paper even there?  I have too recently cleaned out a house.  The home dad left while still alive but not wanting to.  And in going through it, also some of my grandparent’s house in the large taped and labelled cardboard box settled in the study closet; and, even a few bits of when mom’s had been here pulled from dank and dusty corners of the basement.  I know the secrets revealed, the streams of useless cleared, the piles, stacks and drawers of precious papers printed, written, pictured that I, myself, tossed by the handfuls into large, very large, black trash bags.  Muttering aloud a plea begging forgiveness for doing so knowing how much they had meant to him.

And, after the weeding down, the year’s worth of weekends weeding down, the all long day sale that we made fun.  The note K hung on the lamp “I light the world” because she had set it above a globe.  Like that we made it fun we were so tired, the day so blistering hot.  After all that still a garage full of useful things and very, very nice clothes.

We called the man who would take the lot for resale at those markets you see hurriedly erected alongside the road.  B had said so, that is what they do; what he believed the man would do.

But I was mistaken at its value and had to turn away.  In the kitchen as I stood watching through that door on through the dark, two-steps down, cavern of the garage, he had brought the truck with tall wood slat sides backed to it in the fading light of a summer’s late evening.  Fading though it surely was, in memory it is as a bright spotlight on the little man standing atop the heaps of what he had pitched into his empty bed with no thought to what it was, or might be, or had been to us, or dad.  And, with each hard, crushing thrust of his booted foot making room for more, each jamming down of dirty steel-toe onto the beautiful cranberry felt-wool suit, he kicked the breath out of me.  Kicked my stomach into a knot of wanting to double over and vomit just right there on the kitchen floor.

I turned away standing next to the chair where she sat.  She, my stepmother who loved dad and had worn that cranberry suit for him.  She had made her keeping decisions early on, and only once or twice added more that day.  And now she sat without a breath or blink or movement.  Sat and stared and watched that man in the surging, strangling, deliberate intensity of discarding the things that were rightfully his, but had been theirs.

No word or moan of breath of pity or loss, nor gasp of resistance or anger.  Tall and still she sat straight backed without hesitation watching through the dark of the garage that man’s casual care…less…ness.  Whether out of strength or punishment I do not know.  We have never spoken of it.