Rock and Load

It's Saturday morning and I'm listening to my son doing color commentary on the state of the refrigerator.

"This is disgusting. Yuck. Who put this in here?"

He marches out of the kitchen and thrusts a half empty can of green chilis toward me.

"Mom, are we saving this?"

I don't want to crush my child's newly found zeal for search and destroy style housekeeping, but I happen to know that my husband put this can of chilis in the fridge, doubtless planning to use it for some culinary masterpiece in the near future. If I tell my son to throw it away, my husband might be annoyed. I weigh my husband's probable future irritation with my son's overwhelming need to use the bulldozer approach to cleaning the refrigerator, i.e., everything not nailed down gets pushed into the nearest garbage can, resulting in an appliance that is sparkly clean, fresh smelling, and above all, emptier than when you started.

I recall feeling exactly this way a long time ago, just prior to our move from Grand Rapids to Ludington, except that it was a house I was emptying instead of a refrigerator. I'd been upstairs cleaning the attic and stumbled across a large sack in one corner. Inside the sack were rough pieces of alabaster, pink and white and gray-veined, ranging from a few as small as a baseball to some as big as a loaf of bread.

Maybe it had something to do with being hot and dusty from hours of clearing the detritus that had accumulated after twelve years of cohabitative bliss, maybe it was because I knew that I'd only scratched the surface of what still needed to be organized, maybe it was because I distinctly recalled having moved this same sack of rocks at least three times in the last seven years, but right then I knew I'd never hated anything as much as I hated those rocks.

It didn't matter anymore that I and my husband had driven six hours to collect these very stones, sacrificing an entire afternoon to climb around on quarry piles in the hot sun, determined to find the perfect raw material for sculpting candle holders, incense burners and miniature busts.

That day in the attic I had exactly 72 hours before I had to pile everything we owned into a 24-foot truck. The contents of that sack were no longer potential art projects, they were a bag of rocks that weighed about thirty pounds and they represented everything I hated about moving.

I hated having to organize and pack up our stuff in order to move it when it was only going to get unpacked and disorganized the moment we reached our destination. I hated making choices about what had to go or stay and I particularly hated making choices about someone else's belongings, which these rocks technically were. They weren't just my rocks. They were my husband's rocks, too.

That's why I decided to do what I did. After all, he was already at the new place, possibly working hard and not having to pack up the old house. I was resentful about the whole arrangement. Also I was getting help loading the U-Haul from my brother and already was having a hard time justifying the bajillion books that were coming with us. ("Don't they have books in Ludington?") How could I possibly explain a bag of rocks? ("Marie, did you know that this sack has rocks in it?" "Yes." "Don't they have rocks in Ludington?")

Decision made, I crashed the sack down three flights of stairs and dragged it to the curb for the garbage men to take away in the morning. If I didn't accomplish anything else that day it was fine, because the bag of rocks was gone and that was four square feet of misery I wouldn't have to cram on the truck.

The next day on the phone, my husband asked me if I'd remembered to pack a certain bag of rocks. Naturally I told him that I had no idea where they were. Thinking about it fifteen years later, I'm sure I'd throw them away and lie about it again, no problem.

Now my son stands in front of me with can in hand. He's transferred his irritation with me for giving him this particular chore to the refrigerator itself and his body is stiff with that air of righteousness that's so conducive to a good cleaning session. I know exactly how he feels.

"Go ahead and pitch it," I say. "I'll think of something to tell your dad."