Left to clean up the mess...(Aly's Graduation)

I was left to clean up the mess.

My family got out of Dodge for my nephew’s graduation

and I was left to deal with the aftermath 

Of my own daughter’s open house.

Forks matted down in trampled grass 

as if flattened under a thatch roof

Crochet balls with their mangled arches 

were strewn about the yard haphazardly

(Did anyone even play the inane game?)

Paper plates and napkins where blown into the woods

Drenched and stuck to pricker bushes 

after the downpour the night before.

Borrowed extension cords were tangled in piles

Like coiled snakes who had lost their way

Clamped floodlights lay around detached from power sources.

Where did they come from, what were they used for, 

How did they make it to the powerless back of the property?

So many questions…but this is what it is to clean up a mess.

“How did any of this happen?”

After filling garbage bags with everything from gum wrappers

To perfectly unused plastic cups that I didn’t want to bother with

I proceeded to try to put everything that wasn’t disposable back in its place.

To try and get in my wife’s head 

and pretend like I knew where this stuff belonged.

Sticky bowls that once held assorted fruit

Trays that once served as presentations of Costco’s ‘crack’ cake

Children’s “lost and found” boots, socks, and jackets

That were left down by the trampoline

Were now saturated sponges filled with midnight’s rainfall,

My arms became a cornucopia of ophans’ clothing

Abandoned by their caretakers, orphans themselves in many ways.

I made my way to the front of the house to assess the damage,

Hoping to just tidy up a few things.

I had forgotten entirely that we left all the staked signage out in the rain.

Our long driveway was adorned with pictures of Aly’s childhood

From birth up to the present.

Each portrait was affixed to a cheap wooden stake by duct tape--

“was” being the operative word.

The cardboard signs showed every sign of surviving a hurricane,

Blow sideways clinging with the last adhesive surface areas of tape

Holding on like hanging chads in the 2000 presidential election.

Each poster board that formerly held a full color pic of my daughter

Looked like warriors after a long battle, standing there half clothed,

Battered and war-torn, a figment of their former glory.

Yet still standing tall lining the long driveway like continental soldiers.

The pictures each stake held once vibrant with pristine defined color 

Were now runny pieces of abstract art, Picasso-like,

Weathered and withered, arched as the dampness dried and contracted.

I made my way down the long driveway pulling stakes

And ripping the pics off them if they hadn’t already blown off in the night.

Each stake was a journey down memory lane

A portal into a time period of parenting.

Though I had pounded these posters into the ground the day before

I realized that it was only now they were having the effect on me

That they were intended to have on everyone walking down that driveway.

In my haste to get things ready for the brouhaha

I was missing the mementos, the momentous moments.

Each stake I pulled seemed to drive a stake into my own heart

Taking me back and begrudgingly pulling me forward,

Heals dug in while sinews stretched as I resisted and recoiled backwards.

I placed each stake and soggy picture into the trunk of my dilapidated car

And with it felt as if I was making peace 

through this strange ceremony of closure.

Tears would well up in the corners of my eyes at the sight of some of them,

As if I forgot any of these moments ever happened

And strangely remembering each of them in vivid detail like they occurred yesterday

All at the same time.  

All at the same time.

What started as a two-day project to clean up the carnage 

Turned into a sacred space for me to put the pieces of my own heart 

In their right and rightful place

A sacrament to symbolize something that needed 

an act to be coupled with a ineffable feeling.

An activity on which to hang the dangling appendages of my affections

Memories forced to be reckoned with, cleaned up and put in their places

Litter from the past, named and put in hefty cinch sacks,

Stakes to be pulled from the ground and driven deep within my own heart,

Stabbed with joy and grief.

Fading pictures to be salvaged 

and preserved in the trunk of my own mind’s eye.

It was an unforeseen blessing in disguise as most blessings are…

And thankfully --

I was left to clean up the mess.