essay by Robert P. Barsanti
On Sunday, I came to the worst mess of the summer. The remains of the family who rented the house in Tom Nevers would take the better part of six hours to clean up.
I knew it would. Every year they rent the same place, stay for two weeks, and leave with nothing but memories. Everything else remains piled up in the house. On this weekend, the wind had turned and pushed the fog and humidity out to sea. The hurricane had left some waves, but the sky was clear and the air Canadian. For a moment, I thought of them on the boat, leaving on the one glorious day at the end of two weeks of wet, warm, and wild. Enjoy Minnesota, I saluted.
Caretaking has gotten easier this summer. Houses that needed to be turned over once a week, now are turning over once a month. Mow the lawns, clean the pool, check for leaks. The phone does not chirp and sputter much, aside from the usual locked doors and broken windows. The owners don’t want to talk to me, and they definitely don’t want to see an invoice.
The rich and privileged may have known about the sputtering rental and real estate market. They may have figured that the owners would be very happy to have their business back for another year, no matter the mess they left behind. Their deposit would remain good and constant, rolling over to another August.
And they were probably right.
This year they used every bed in the house. I started at the master bedroom, then prowled through the other rooms, stripping the bed linens and tucking them into pillow cases. Each set of sheets dropped a half cup of sand onto the floor. Had I been more careful, I would have brought them out to the porch and shaken them out, but the whole house would need a vacuum anyway. In addition to the beds, they had pulled out the sofa-bed, laid mattresses and sleeping bags on the floor and had even dragged the old, musty, and deeply stored IKEA mattress out to the porch so that someone could sleep under the stars. They came with their kids, and those kids had their own kids, and, of course, they were kids as well, so their parentshad to come. All of those people stuffed into the house, from the loft down to the basement and, this year, out on the deck.
The refrigerator had become an archeological dig. I should write a message on the door: “Nobody will use your leftovers.” It wouldn’t matter: turnover day is dedicated to flat tonic water, extra plastic tubs of tartar sauce, ketchup, mustard, relish, and grapefruit flavored beer. In the refrigerator they also left three jars of baby food, two bottles of Ensure, a tin of French fries, and two servings of blackberry buckle in a dish. The freezer had a good sized chunk of frozen bluefish, empty ice trays, and two bottles that looked a lot like frozen breast milk.
In the rest of the kitchen, a bag of potato chips, a box of Cheerios, and three bananas had surrendered to time, fog, and fruit flies. In the corner, they had restored and re-stacked three empty boxes of the local beer, four blueberry and cranberry vodka bottles, and two empty bottles of Cold Duck. Apparently, there had been a party. I filled a trash bag, then brought the empties to the bed of the truck. They sat with their backs against the cab, next to the slouched bags of sheets.
While I vacuumed, I found other gifts the rich and privileged had left for me. Coins and golf tees were the usual leftovers, but so were the receipts, the match books, pens, a newspaper, and one pink pacifier. Unless I wanted to mail the pacifier back, I didn’t collect anything that anyone would call for in a panic. On the other hand, they left two jigsaw puzzles, a book of Sudoku, and the last two Elin books tucked into the book shelves.
They had used all of the towels. All twelve were hanging on the clothes line, still damp, still stiff with salt, still dirty. Underneath the second floor deck, and tucked under the first floor windows, all of the beach equipment remained sandy. The boogie boards, the stand up paddle boards, the umbrellas, the chairs, and the rest of the toys waited for a firm and demanding spray from the hose. The bikes, rods and the golf clubs had migrated around the house but they didn’t look particularly dirty, and, from sad experience, I didn’t think they would profit from the hose treatment.
At the far end of the yard, as close as caution would allow to the scrub oak and brush, the fire pit held court amid six Adirondack chairs. They had been dragged out of storage, or off the deck, or, finally, from the brush and set up around a metal dish filled with ash, a burnt twig or two, and the melted corpses of three red cups. From the look of the woodpile, they may have had fires every night.
It took hours. The trash bags filled all of the cans. The remains of corn, lobsters, and diapers peaked out through the white plastic. As I tossed them into the bed filled with the remains of the rich and privileged, I decided this would require at least two visits back to the house. The bathrooms needed to be cleaned, as did the kitchen, and all of the wooden floors.
They had had a week. They had a week with four generations in the same building, waking up to the sun, sitting beside the ocean, and falling asleep beneath the smear of the Milky Way. The old people muttered, the baby cried, and the kids whispered their worries to each other. But this year, there had been births, but no funerals, no long hospital stays, no unanswered and angry silences. They had all been here, at this moment, for this one instant, with the tides of time held off by luck, patience, and cash.
They truly were rich and privileged.
