Underlay

I am helping my friend make her house ready to sell. She's lived here for years and years, longer than I've lived anywhere in my life. She has summoned the courage to end her marriage and now is moving on to what I think will be the best part of her life.

It's interesting how many metaphors open completely when one is engaged in a process like this. Her husband was indifferent to the idea of divorce just as he is indifferent and astonishingly oblivious to the process of the move itself. He remains in place and seems not to be even thinking about packing his belongings and he does not seem to grasp the fact that he and my friend are no longer joined in anyway but through the children and this transitional proximity. There's a reality rift in this house and it teaches me things about life and work and art every day, even when I don't realize it.

At the moment I am in the house alone. I had vowed to continue the work my friend, her partner and I have been carrying out on her ex-husband's office. But the day is sunny and lovely and his office, like the other spaces he chooses to occupy here, is dark and gloomy. The windows are blocked and it is cluttered beyond belief. I cannot give up the sunshine, cannot give up the loveliness of the day to be, however efficiently, imprisoned in that nightmareish space - the space where he chooses to live. Even thinking about making such a choice, I find myself shaking my head.

Since I arrived, we have opened the blinds in several of the larger rooms for the first time in months if not years. He prefers them to be closed and prefers lights on at night. I can't get over how it feels to help my friend begin to reverse this process. To throw open the windows and let light come into this lovely old space, to clear out the piles and piles and piles of old flyers, church bulletins, frequent flyer point statements dating back to the 1980's. It's like an infected wound that cannot close until it is cleaned out.

And now the carpet.

The upstairs living room (there are two) is carpeted in green shag. It was wallpapered in heavy oppressive paper but we have torn that down and repainted. Today, I am beginning to rip the carpet up.

As I tear through the brittle old shag I encounter the crumbling underlay. In many places it has turned to powder. In other places it is cemented to the floor in some places from the pressure of wear but in others from spilled soda-pop or wine or water from the Christmas tree, spills that were absorbed into the carpet and seemed to disappear but only went deeper. The spills went deeper and glued the ugly stuff more firmly into place but one thing I know - they can't keep her here forever. We are tearing this stuff up, scraping the floor clean, filling bag after bag with the accumulated paper garbage of nearly 30 years.

We are opening the windows, lifting the shutters, watering the garden and nothing - certainly not a passive man who prefers the dark, is ever going to trap my friend in a cave again.