The Lists of the Past by Julie Hayden

Author:Julie Hayden
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Catapult
Published: 1976-12-15T00:00:00+00:00

The Lists of the Past

The Stories of the House

Saturday 8/30/69

(1) Cut Grass South Side

(2) Rake Turnaround

(3) Prune

a—Garage Maple

b— “Mulberry

c—Front”

(4) Choking Pine?

(5) Front Taxus

(6) Side Apple Tree

(7) Move Cut Stuff from Side

(8) Pickets?

(9) Mirror?

1, 2, 4, and 9 have been excised from this list of chores with a horizontal stroke; 9, in addition, with a neat tick mark. The following day,

Sunday 8/31

he has more plans:

Stain Desk

(1) Front Porch Stuff

(2) Apple Tree

(3) Maple Tree

(4) Chair

(5) TRH Book Case Cut Out

(6) Drug Stuff

(7) Cokes

(8) Lettuce

Evidently, the desk was stained, front porch cleaned up, maple and apple pruned. Cokes, drug stuff, lettuce bought. Lettuce bought? No, lettuce weeded, or picked, because this is an outdoorsman’s list, a suburban gardener’s, and lettuce, given its head, by August is almost a nuisance vegetable.

The lists are in a clipboard on a cellar workbench totally marred by nail holes, rust, paint, glue, hammer gouges, and cigarette burns, and are written on all kinds of paper: lined tablet, milk-order forms, old envelopes, the backs of grocery bills. Dampness and dirt have weathered the lists, softened the penciled admonitions, some of which are for others:

Myron—Paint New Window.

Or:

Water Hyacinths

C—Feed Birds

Plant Bulbs?

The latter an afterthought, boxed in with red pencil at the top of a more ambitious schedule—his or Myron’s?

(1) Vacuum and Scrub around Furnace

(2) Tighten Storm Windows

a—Study

b—all others

(3) Wash Window Landing—chamois

a—Inside

b—Outside?

3a—Move Study Furniture

(4) Polish Brass Work

(5) Wash Butlers Pantry Doors

(6) Turn Geraniums

(7) Xmas Stuff to 3rd Floor

(8) Drain Boiler

Nos. 1, 3, 7, and 8 crossed off; along the bottom, in another handwriting, the message See you in two weeks.

Such a lot of things for him to do, that have to be done, inside and outside. If he (or Myron) isn’t trimming cedars, he’s topping 2 hemlocks, trimming All Bushes by House, weeding, feeding roses, trimming cedars (jobs move through the lists till they’re crossed out, or make comebacks). The house demands perpetual care. Washing, painting, seasonal chores, restless furniture. Red armchair ever on the gad: 2nd Floor to Maid’s Room, to basement, Garage Loft. He listens to the sounds of the house at night, roof cricking in the January freeze—loose shingle? What is that noise in the walls, like water leaking from a pipe, oozing down through the insulation to drip through the new paint on my living-room ceiling? Call Electrician reg. Hissing Sound. Oven Pilot Light. Clean up Garden. Paint Garage Cable. Kill Crab.

Why, he works like a slave.

Beside Xmas stuff on 3rd Floor, in a roomy closet, a carton of photographs at least eighteen inches deep. Here, in the middle of the collection, a young man leans on an ax, foot on a tree stump, somewhere along the Appalachian Trail, chin thrust toward the camera—a man who simply has cut down a tree. Here the same young man is again (among ancestors, collaterals, peers, strangers, friends, a German wedding party circa 1910), a father looking at a baby in a playpen—and a different, cruder house, with an open porch that will become a sunroom, a wilderness of lawn, and only some hollyhocks to adumbrate a garden.

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