GARAGE

 

Sometimes it takes a tall sexy blonde visiting from

Lithuania, your slender new friend with the cute accent,

to magically clear out 5 years of mess in the scary(“skeery”

 

to her) chaos of your garage and recover 12 years of wild

paintings buried under greasy accumulations of what seems

like several severed lifetimes.

 

Even the forgotten flaming Mexican volcano Popocatépetl

was resurrected yesterday, so good to see her erupting again

on the rickety easel in the backyard! Yes, Loreta rolled up her

 

sleeves in such an efficient explosion of desire to help as she

cut through and organized immense piles of cardboard boxes

of every size and shape, sorted scores of acrylic and oil paint

 

tubes leaking crimson and cerulean and burnt amber onto

the damp slick cement floor, constructed piles of rocks and shells

from god-knows-where--the Sierras, Oregon, the zinc-grey Baltic

coast, Michoacan, Paricutin, Volcan de Colima, the Grand Canyon’s

 

layered depths, and then those infinite flocks of yellowed bank

statements, old phone bills, partially ripped medical visit receipts and several embarrassing spiral bound journals from the last century,

dog-eared confessionals I’d never want my kids to read when I’m dead,

 

stranded in slightly soggy unmarked cartons, even your brother’s ashes were re-discovered today—they’d been waiting these 2 years to be

returned to the wet earth of Portland—his home during the decades’ long estrangement from our family.

 

Later this weekend, in the new-found spacious appendage to my house,

I’ll beckon her and in yellow light streaming through the open garage door we shall pick up these two paddles, happy to no longer be ignored

 

where they were buried for months under wrinkled Christmas

wrapping, old ornaments and my recently deceased dear friend’s

gorgeous paintings of Buddha, Krishna, Christ and their sacred ilk.

 

We’ll smile easily, tap and bounce an ivory white ping-pong ball between us on the empty green table top made in Germany, the one

 

shining piece of furniture which always transforms a house into home, this impractical gift to myself purchased 5 years’ ago with the last of the

money instead of a cream colored washer and dryer, so boringly

 

pragmatic, the so-called laundry room a jumble of stacked Trader Joe bags, baseball caps, screwdrivers, haphazard hammers and wrenches, those ubiquitous plastic sacks, nuts and bolts galore, and yes, devoid still of all stacked or unstacked automatic appliances.