Rolling up the Oriental rug unloosed a motley collection of items that accumulated over the years.
By Sarah Schrock
What gets swept under the rug after a decade of life well-lived in the Methow? For starters, I am not talking about suppressed emotions here, I want to keep this one light. I literally mean, what gets swept under the rug? I should know because our 8-by-10 area rug that’s been in the same spot for nine years, anchored by dressers and chairs, is now rolled up and ready to go into storage as part one of what feels like in a new reality show I am living.
Call it Ultimate Spring Cleaning. We are moving out of our bedroom and bathroom of almost 10 years, moving into our guest room, downsizing temporarily to one bathroom, and beginning a long-planned remodeling project.
When I say long, it’s been nearly a decade of thinking this through. So, the reason I have little to report on on-goings around town is that I have been deep cleaning, rearranging, moving furniture for the past week, purging well-worn items, obsolete electronics — and I have barely left the house in days. We shipped our kids out of the valley for the mid-winter break in an engineered plan to get this done.
I didn’t think there’d be too much emotion around this, since I have been obsessing about this remodel for a decade, anticipating change. But vacuuming the rug for the last time, I found myself getting a little nostalgic about the memories of the room — like cozy cold nights watching movies in bed with the fire’s warmth or nursing our babies in the wee hours of the night and gazing out the French doors at the stars. Other than the king-sized bed we bought during my second pregnancy to fully commit to the “family” bed concept, every item in the room is a hand-me-down from family and holds its own stories.
There’s a French settee that traveled across the Atlantic on a ship with my great-grandmother’s family from France to California; it had a life on Chicago’s south side, and now here with me. There’s the dresser that lived right next door to this house in the house that was once owned by John and Laura Bonica. When Laura moved to Seattle 13 years ago, she gave us some furniture, including a dresser. We didn’t live next door yet, in fact, we lived in a single-wide trailer in Winthrop and that dresser followed us from the Methow, to Oregon, then back here where we landed next door to the house from where it had come — a total coincidence.
Then there’s the rug. It’s the Oriental rug that was in my parents living room during my adolescence. It feels like home. The armchair is also from my parent’s house. When my brother visited for the first time a few years ago, he mused at how it felt like walking back into time, only in a different place.
Before I get into the gory details of what gets swept under the rug, by far the most telling revelation of this process is that life in the valley is just dirty.
There is dirt, everywhere. Our closets, when emptied, looked akin to a beach. With the volume of sandy grit, numerous gravel pebbles tracked in on shoes, rocks once collected by my kids that found their way into corners and creases of the room, the used the baby hair comb I found in the bathroom fashion as a rake, I could have recreated the famous Zen garden Ryoan-ji in my closet.
Under the rug (and amongst a few drawers): at least $3 in quarters, dimes, nickels and pennies — so many pennies. Buttons. New buttons that come in plastic pouches with new clothes. Old buttons — from what, I have no idea. Clothing tags. Hair bands, bobby pins, safety pins, old Mother’s Day cards, a garage sale sticker for 85 cents. Legos, miscellaneous small toy parts, a furniture screw, broken bits of plastic from who knows what. A retail plastic sock hanger.
It feels good getting the grime and clutter out. What comes next will be episode two, demolition. Until this is over, I might need you telling me what’s going on!
