Dust and Ashes

Orangeness 13: Dust and Ashes

I scattered my mother’s ashes at the site of the old family house. You might think that Massachusetts is a barren sub-arctic place inhabited only by granite boulders and evergreen trees, but that isn’t true. There are jungles of vines and scrubby swamp trees wherever people do not cut it back. And that was where I poured out the ashes. “Fertilize plants, Mother,” was my liturgical blessing. After all, my mother drew tree forms constantly, so she might as well have her remains (or “cremains” as the funeral home called them) turn into trees. Whenever it rains, the water will percolate my mother’s atoms into the soil along with the roots and the mushrooms. Good enough for Nature.

I was nervous about opening up the little dark blue box of Cremains. What if it looked kind of like mulch, all stringy and roasted and dark, with leftover things in it, like eyeballs and fingernails and bone bits and the metal pin that they attempted to fasten her together with, what if there was still something recognizable in the pile? Fortunately, the funeral people had ground it all up or cleaned it, so that the remains of my mother looked like a fine mass of greyish-white powder, easy enough to undo the plastic bag and sprinkle it here and there in the jungle. A neighbor was kind enough to witness this, so I wouldn’t have to do it all by myself.

I was wearing high boots so I could walk through the brush and leaf piles, but since there was a wind the ashes blew from the places I poured onto the new polish of my boots. We wiped the ashes off but now no matter what, my fancy outdoor high footwear will have some atomized remnant of my mother’s existence on them as long as they exist. But were the ashes to speak, they would complain that I had paid too much for the boots.

This harmless dust resembled no less, or more, than the heavy deposit of sticky powder that had accumulated in my mother’s bedroom over the years and years of neglect. It was on the windowsills, the tables, the jewelry boxes, the cabinets, the tschotschkes on the shelves, the shelves, the TV, the video cassette player from the 1990s, the annihilated unplayed cassettes, and almost a thousand books, piled up after reading and never touched. After seeing the ashes, I realized that my mother had already partially disintegrated and was turning into ashes even before she passed away. And now I look at the same thing happening on my cluttered shelves and in my cluttered dwelling and my cluttered living room filled with the pre-ashen detritus of the old house. I swear to the great Goddess Kondo (Japanese de-cluttering queen), I swear to the God of dust and ashes, DON’T LET THIS HAPPEN TO ME. Dust, dust in the wind, dust on the books, as my birthday approaches: Take it away, throw it out, blow the dust off before you become dust yourself.