A summer cleaning project digs up a man’s painful, buried memories.
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Each item had a voice, and all spoke of abandonment.
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On Saturday, I decided to clean out the shed, a dilapidated structure at the back of my property filled with the detritus of half-completed and fully forgotten projects. I found mostly what I expected. Bags of potting soil, garden-enhancing chemicals bought for plants that had died long ago, rusty tools, rotting cardboard from old moving boxes, many cans of paint, broken toys, things in need of repair that were really in need of discarding, bubble wrap, packing popcorn, tangled hoses, a red plastic toboggan. The smell of all this moldering stuff (I forgot to mention that the roof of the shed leaks) was overwhelming, enveloping, like the past if you close your eyes and let the stream of images flood across your mind’s screen. Each item had a voice, and all spoke of abandonment.
It was not the surge of hatred I felt, which always opens the cover of the catalog of reasons why I am not with her any more.
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