Morning all. I hope you had a good night. I slept strangely and have a sore neck, but I did sleep deeply so I suppose it is trade off. For now, I am ready to just jump into the day. So timers set and lets see what story arrives with today’s sentence.
I like this start. Usually when you start with this sort of thing it is a family secret, but I like that this seems to be going another direction. Maybe. I suppose the furniture could hide clues to a family secret. But I like the surprise of going a different way with this.
Tuesday, August 11th: The light was bright.
The light was bright. Not only had he left the curtains open but he slept late. He lay there blinking in the morning sun and wondered when the last time he actually got up after the sunrise. He couldn’t remember.
He blinked momentarily feeling alien to himself. He was not an early riser by nature. He was a night owl. Always had been. He got a lot done in the hours after everyone went to sleep. He still did. He just started waking up earlier as well. It was as though his body didn’t need as much sleep.
Or at least that was what he told himself.
He woke before the sun made it above the horizon and did everything that needed to be done before his work day started. The list was a long one at the moment. He was clearing out the family house. His grandparents house and then his parents. When his parents took over from his grandparents they hadn’t bothered to clear anything out. They just moved what they were taking into the house with them.
As far as he could tell his grandparents did the same thing when they took over from his grandfather’s parents. It was a lot to go through.
When he mentioned it to others there were often ohhs and ahhs as though they expected he would be unearthing delightful family treasures. Unless every circular the grocery store sent out was a collection suddenly worth money, he doubted treasure was going to be unearthed. There were some good furniture pieces, more solid than fancy, truth be told, but there was an awful lot of junk. He was coming to realize that his family had been multigenerational hoarders. He wasn’t sure how he missed that before.
It somehow didn’t seem apparent when everyone was alive. Everything seemed neat and tidy. Things just seemed to pile up in the back corners out of sight when he came to visit.
Putting in several hours before officially starting his day was the only way he was going to get through it in a timely manner. Not that anyone was clocking him, but the sight of the mounds and mounds to get through made him twitchy.
Then there was work. The law of averages would have work slowing down when his private life took over but in terms of universal law Murphy had always been his friend. Work sped up and he found himself on a slalom. He worked late and often took work home with him working into the night.
Only to get up before the sun the next morning and do it all again.
He told himself it was fine, simply because it needed to be done. He convinced himself he could and he did. Then he reached the end. The house was clear, the major work project was finished and the office went back to normal. At the house he began cataloging the repairs that needed to be done and slowly ticking off the ones he could do on his own. What he couldn’t do, he hired out and somehow, everything was repaired. There was decorative work to do, painting and such, but the house was clean, sturdy and no longer filled with the accumulation of ages. The furniture he could use was in storage. Each piece would be cleaned and evaluated before he decided to let it back in the house.
Ten til Midnight 