The World According To Anne Arky

My sister, the executrix of Mother and Daddy’s estate, was pretty well determined to divide up Mother’s stuff during the weekend of the funeral and get the house emptied out as soon as possible so we could sell it. I didn’t have the money to get a truck and make my part of that process happen right then, and I figured we were all going to be one big walking nerve ending and not likely to have much interest in being diplomatic or considerate of each other’s feelings. (Even on a good day, we usually aren’t that, and I didn’t reckon on that weekend being filled with good days.) She was hell-bent to do it, though, so I steeled myself to be ready to walk out of the house empty-handed, without looking back. I still remember vividly the 1974 estate brawl between my parents and Uncle Asshole and his wife (I was the only one of the three of us kids that witnessed it, and I was on the front lines), and it almost came down to a blood letting. Since then, I had been dreading the property split we would someday have, knowing that despite the fact that she has more money than the rest of the whole family combined and could go out and buy anything she wants, my sister had a way of getting anything and everything she wanted and wanting everything I wanted just because I wanted it, and my brother wasn’t much better (minus the money factor). Thirty-three years is a long time to have something hanging over your head, you know? I had a lot of things in the house that I’d put in storage years ago, and I was pretty well ready to walk off and leave it and everything, because I just wasn’t ready to get into any knock-down drag-out fights over things. Also, some of the things I really wanted were heirloom-type things, like a cabinet my dad’s dad had commissioned to be built in the 1930s, which he left to my mother, because while he was the designer and owner, it was her uncle who had built it, so it was a double family heirloom, with history from both sides of the family. (Sort of like the furniture equivalent of double first cousins.) There was a time when I would have gone to the mat for things like that, but a few years ago I realized that having family heirlooms in my possession wasn’t nearly as important as it could have been, since I don’t have anybody to pass it on to – kids of my own, anyway. Somewhere along the way, the whole thing just ceased to be of much importance at all. If it came to it, I was just going to get in the car and leave and never look back, because frankly, it’s just stuff, and they could just stuff it. If there’s one thing I do NOT have a shortage of, it’s stuff.

But you know what? Amazingly, it went very well, and everybody seemed exceedingly polite about what they wanted, making sure that nobody else minded or wanted a particular item before laying claim to it. I had envisioned that it would be a “gimme-I-want fest” and quickly be reduced to the bloodshed level, but as far as I know, everyone got everything they wanted, and I only gave up one of the four things that I absolutely wanted. I didn’t feel like I had to give that one up, but it was number four on my list, and it turned out that I was getting a lot of other things I had not counted on (some of which I longed for years ago but figured I’d never get after I found out that my sister wanted them as well), so I could afford to be generous. Besides, with all the other stuff I was going to be getting, I wouldn’t have had room for it anyway, so it was easy. Like I said, everyone prefaced every desire with, “If you don’t mind…” or “If nobody wants this, I’d like it.” I kept wondering who these people were and what aliens had possessed my family, all the while wondering if they would keep them, because I liked these people! Very strange! My brother, of course, did have to show his ass at least once while we were there. He did so while we were in Florida, also, and probably did irreparable damage to his relationship with his daughter. I’ll spare you the details, but I will tell you that when she was deciding what to take from Mother’s house, she elected to leave behind the toy box my brother had bought her for Christmas in 1977, probably the only thing he ever bought her. This was not an accident, as it was quite visible in the mix, and her husband told my sister that they were leaving it and that it was a hard decision for her. To me, that she left it spoke volumes for the future of their relationship.

The funniest part about the property split was that the only argument anyone ever had over anything was after everything in the house had been divided up and most of us were already gone, at which point my sister and brother almost came to blows after everyone else left – over my Squeegy that I’d inadvertently left in the driveway! The only reason I even heard about it was that I knew my sister was having someone come over and haul off the junk from Mother’s carport and such, and I just wanted to alert her to the fact that there was a perfectly good Squeegy that I’d left there, and someone should take and keep it rather than letting it go to the dump. She told me they had already discovered it and fought over it, with each of them yelling, “But I wanted that!” and she ended up with it. How weird! Even funnier is that she brought it back to me when I saw her last month (more on that later). I didn’t want it back – I just didn’t want it to get tossed as trash.

I spent the next month and a half trying to figure out what I was going to do with all this furniture that was coming my way (not to mention the boxes and boxes of things both mine and Mother’s). I sold the white wicker bedroom set I’d bought soon after I bought my house, and I gave away a couch and chair. Then Melanie and I spent the next few weeks moving mountains – mountains of furniture, mountains of boxes, etc. Presidents’ Day weekend, I drove up to Virginia and my sister met me there; we spent Saturday and Sunday getting things ready to be moved (she had already spent a couple of weekends before helping my niece and her husband get the rest of the things they couldn’t get in early January – my brother got all his the weekend of Mother’s funeral), and Monday we drove back to Georgia, with her driving the truck and me driving my car. The next day, she flew back to DC. I had wanted her and her husband to stop by my house en route to Mother’s when they left Florida, but she said he was (in essence) acting like an ass and would likely not make it a pleasant overnight stay, so she would come to Georgia with me when I got my stuff from Mother’s later. It worked out very well, and we had a nice visit. The trip was supposed to consist of both of us getting our stuff, with her son and his fiancé riding down with her, renting a truck and one of them driving back the truck and one driving back the car to DC with her stuff and the things her son is taking, but the fiancé’s grandfather is ill, so they didn’t make the trip, so she drove down in Mother’s car, which she left at Mother’s to be retrieved later.