I talked myself into a couple days of tackling more Bob stuff. I seem to have fallen into a pattern, both in his room and the barn - I can clean like mad for a day or two, and then I'm overwhelmed, and I can hear his voice saying "would you PLEASE quit throwing my stuff away!!!"
When you successfully live with someone, you live with their quirks - or turn a blind eye to their quirks. Bob couldn't have enough of things. Like those propane tanks I wrote about. Or his 5-gallon military Jerry cans. We were at a flea market a few years ago and he spotted one. "Oooo - those are getting harder to find." I pointed out that we had about 40 of them in the barn. "But they're getting harder to find." So #41 came home.
He often complained that he needed to somehow find more storage space in his room (but bristled if I suggested maybe he could cull some stuff). So I'm finding stuff like plastic sprue. When you buy a model kit, all the parts come on a plastic frame called sprue. And there's usually extra parts - maybe you want wheels on this kit, or maybe treads. You use the parts you need - and keep the rest in case you need it for a future model. You also keep the sprue. You might need it to make a shovel handle, or warm it up and stretch it to make an antenna. So he saved it. All of it. And he's been making models for decades. I threw away 3 tall bags of sprue and spare parts. He saved plastic - old credit cards, the plasticized labels that came with garden plants. He saved Popsicle sticks and corn dog sticks. He might be able to use one or two someday - but dozens?
So I've tossed another 8 bags of stuff in the last two days. But the one that hurt, the one that twisted my heart every time I saw it, was the neatly packed kit that was eventually supposed to go to Gainesville. After he got his bone marrow transplant he was supposed to have stayed at the Hope House for three months. He thought he'd be bored out of his mind. He knew he couldn't take his usual model making stuff, but he thought maybe he could hone his skills at painting figures. So he had a neatly packed kit of his various paints, brushes, third hand holder - anything necessary to work on figures. We had left it at home - the idea was that when I came home for a bit after he was in the Hope House (his friend Kim and I were going to trade off Bob-sitting duties) I would bring it up to him.
Of course, it never left Tallahassee. It would have taken him a long time to even attempt it, even he he had it. A friend had brought him a small laser cut trebuchet kit - the kind meant for ages 8+. During the time that we were out of the hospital and in the hotel (the Hope House didn't work out), he tried working on it. I remember him crying in frustration when he couldn't focus and couldn't get his hands to work (his medication made them tremble).
That neatly packed kit represented our hopes, our expectations. The transplant would have been successful, he would have been bored, and set up on the little table in the room and worked on painting figures. And eventually he would have come home.
So today I unpacked it, put all the brushes and paints and figures away, and wept with frustration. This is not how it should have been.
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