In the last two weeks we’ve come a lot closer to winding up JP’s estate than we were before. T and I drove a Ryder truck to Arlington on the 11th to help C clear out his apartment, which has been sitting empty since his death, and to bring back a combination of furniture, much of which will go into the apartment T wants to get for herself this summer, and family heirlooms. C had already done a bunch of rough cleaning and clearing before we got there; he got the most unenviable chore of cleaning up the inevitable mess that comes from an unattended corpse and unattended pets.
One treat was being able to visit Moon in Fort Worth, who offered us guest space. I hadn’t actually seen her in more than two years. I only wish I hadn’t been so tired both evenings, and could have stayed up a later to talk more. Moon still holds a significant place in my heart, and I miss getting to be with her.
We spent a lot of Saturday wrapping and packing—a full set of china, kitchenware, glasses, a few computer bits and pieces, and a metric assload of Family Stuff. We packed a Chauncey Jerome ogee mantel clock from about 1840 that used to sit in the living room when I was a kid, a Seth Thomas “round band” shelf clock from about 1900 that sat in the den, my great-grandmother’s silver-plate coffee and tea service and soup tureen (which she always called the “punchbowl,” and had engraved around the bowl with a quotation about drinking), given her for her wedding in 1899, several incredibly fragile photo albums with badly faded snapshots of my father’s father in his doughboy kit (some of the pictures were obviously taken when he was in France in 1918-19), Dad’s parents as newlyweds traveling in Venezuela, Colombia, and the Netherlands Antilles in 1922 when my grandfather worked as an oil company engineer down there, a whole gallery of other framed family photographs, cap badges and things from my father’s time in the Navy during World War II and at American Airlines in 1953, and a magnificently preserved black wool charro suit with elaborate white frogging that Dad bought to wear in the Comanche County centennial celebration parade in 1954. (I also have a home movie that shows him wearing the suit and riding his appaloosa in the parade, and looking incredibly dashing.)
And that was just part of the portabilia. We took JP’s dining room set for four, which is in imMENSEly better condition than our own, a huge and gorgeous Art Deco armoire that just screams 1938 to put in T’s room, meaning she can finally throw out the horrible chipboard dresser she’s had to use for years, an early 20th century pie safe with the original pressed-tin panels still present, although somewhat decayed, and lacking its back (gotta find a period piece of wood from someplace to make a new back), and a pretty little walnut-veneer butler’s desk that T claimed because she needs a work/study space. C and B, who had claimed JP’s leather couch and recliners, gave T their old sofa and easy chair, upholstered in an icky dark-green fabric but still usable, toward furnishing her apartment.
We originally planned to pack Saturday and load that night, but it became completely clear in the middle of the day that we were not gonna be ready to go before sometime Sunday, and we were gonna be mostly worn out and not up to wrestling big fragile pieces of furniture across a narrow catwalk and into the truck. C decided it was time to regroup and called a moving service he’d already scoped out several days before, and they agreed to provide a crew to load the truck for us. Hiring the movers may be some of the best money he ever spent; we’d never have managed without them. Four of them descended, wrapped the biggest pieces in shrinkwrap to keep doors and drawers from flopping around and falling out, and loaded the truck with a quarter of the fuss we would have done, in less than half the time. They were done before two, and we drove back across the Mid-Cities to C’s house, loaded up the sofa and chair, and went home. I-35 was no worse than it usually is (which is quite bad enough, thankyouverymuch) and we were back in Austin by seven.
T spent much of the trip home phoning various military friends of hers at Fort Hood, trying to dragoon them to come help us unload the truck. I tried to get hold of Tomax to come help, but she was riding back from a scrimmage in Dallas, and wisely unavailable. In the end only one of T’s theoretical four military friends showed up, but it’s a good thing he did. We would have had a struggle unloading the armoire and the bed if he hadn’t. I think we owe him and his wife one now.
Despite everyone’s (mostly my) best intentions, we got nowhere NEAR through unloading the truck Sunday night—I’d badly underestimated how tired we’d all be—so I called in for a personal day on Monday, and L and I spent the day unloading. The two of us got everything else either into the house or into storage that day, and I managed to get the truck back barely under the wire for just one extra day.
We still have boxes all over the place in the living and dining areas, because I have NO idea where we’re gonna put a bunch of this stuff, but we have it in possession, the apartment is dealt with, and the probate is one step closer to being over.
