tuckova

Each apartment in our building has its own little cellar space, about a 10×10 space with an infinite capacity for cobweb storage, and possibly also mouse habitation. Friday night we cleaned out the cellar. Well, sort of we did. We started cleaning it and then Squire shut the door with the keys inside, and so then we spent some time breaking down the door, and then we cleaned it some more, and then I realized I was sweeping a dirt floor, so we stopped. It was a whole-building thing, all of us down there in our grubbiest clothes, some wearing babushka headscarves (ala Russia, not ala Kate Bush) and groaning at the smell and the dust and the only-blame-yourself human habit of saving things we don't love until they are moldy and horrid. It was quite an evening. Some other cellar owners had piled their stuff right outside our door, so we couldn't actually take most of our stuff out of our room; we just stacked it neatly inside the door. The truck came today to pick it all up, and it was a moment of liberating excitement for me – soon, all this crap will be gone! – but then the truck got full before the movers got as far as our cellar. So we have neatly stacked piles of mouldering cardboard boxes and stuff now, yay.

I look very enticing with cobwebs in my hair, I have to say. And I think Friar REALLY enjoyed tearing the old wardrobe apart with basically a hammer and his bare hands (all our larger tools are at the cotthut). It turns out it wasn't the worst way to spend a Friday night, destruction and clearing away rubbish. I am comfortably sore today, the way you are when you strain your muscles doing Something Useful, like helping a friend move or waxing a floor or anything like that. It would have been better if we had actually had the stuff taken away, of course, but that part almost wasn't surprising. I haven't gotten that optimistic about life in the last week or anything. And I did the parts that I could do, which is perfectly fine.