A lynx in a phone booth or stuck on a roof?

Today starts with a gaggle of employees from Reynolds & Reynolds (the branded cardigans give them away) complaining about a classroom being sent into quarantine.  Obviously, none of them were masks. One balked at the idea of being vaccinated. I'm trying not to judge, but yeah...I may be falling short.

'The lights may be on, but they ain't shining bright,' he says 

'Don't you go thinking I'm crazy. I just do things in an unusual way.'

The Junk Kings CEO arrives at 9am to do the walk through.  'Your scheduler blocked me off a whole day, but realistically? I think we're talking 2-3 days or 4 crews.'

'How do you....'

'I work the archives side of this craziness. I get tonnage. I just...'. My voice breaks.  There are moments where the sheer magnitude of everything that has happened in the month pool around my feet.  

We negotiate on the price point. Fleas buzz around our heads as we quickly do the walk through. It still hurts. I wonder if it will ever not hurt, if I will ever feel neutral about what has transpired here.  If I let it, the rage would burn bright enough to light the entire county. 

Whilst the crew get started with the worst, I start on the attic. It strikes me as one of life's oddities that I know so much of this house, but that I have never been in the attic. It is unfinished, boxes tossed haphazardly.  I climb up, lean to reach a box just that bit too far out no i. But I'm stubborn and frustrated, so of course I climb up the rest of the way, only to fall through.  

Of course, falling is a skill I have cultivated over the years, both in metaphor and real time.  I register the crack of the sheetrock before I know I am falling,  instinctively tucking into a roll.  I land on a mound of tarpulin and bedding from the fifth-wheel folks used to go camping.  Nothing broken, only bruised, but it shakes sense into me. Leave this part of the work to the others. 

By 1:45, the entire kitchen is stripped and sorted: hard core rubbish, the salvageable and re-usable, all segmented out. I have just enough time to get to the nursing home before the estate attorney arrives.  Daddy is on form: grouchy and brighter than he has been. We spar gently. But it fills me with sadness, the way it is going. I adjust his pillow when the lawyer arrives so we can sit up, so his tailbone isn't jammed into the unforgiving mattress, so the wounds on his backside aren't being abraided. When I leave, it is to meet cleaners for an estimate and to wash the itchy grit of insulation off my skin, to collect my kids and inject a bit of Midwestern status quo back into my day.  Freshly scrubbed, I'm just another Mombot, out running the errands. You'd never know the story, seeing me drive along singing odf-key.

https://open.spotify.com/track/15LTdDHTQa6ZD6qtnQosLL?si=Zg93poy_Tq6G4u1bBWFXVA&utm_source=copy-link&dl_branch=1