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Sunday, November 6, 2005

Sunday was a day for sorting through the stuff I had dragged down from the attic. There were numerous boxes of old toys, books and papers from my childhood in the '70s. I also found a few boxes of my mother's moments from the '50s, including a photo of an old boyfriend. Some of these materials I re boxed for continued storage, while some of the toys I boxed with the potential for selling them on Ebay at some point.

For some reason, my father had kept perhaps a dozen ceiling fans that he had taken out of people's housed while doing contracting work. I assumed they were useless (or too difficult to try to sell) and hauled them out the curb for disposal. Oddly, of the things he remembered, he would constantly ask about those fans, to which I could only reply that they had been taken care of.

Mom was finally able to get started on cleaning out her sewing room. This was a bedroom adjacent to their master bedroom and had served as my bedroom from 1972 until I moved to the back bedroom in 1977. With the persistent refrain, "Oh, just put it in the sewing room" the piles of old clothes and magazines grew over the years until it became largely impassable by the time of my father's stroke. With my mother's time and attention consumed by my father's care, the sewing room became ossified in the '80s, until Rita came calling and ruined much of the contents of that room.

On my daily trip to Lowe's for boxes and Arby's for indeterminate protein, I passed the last vestige of a tent city that had sprung up on the lawn of a former drive-in movie theatre that has lately become a driving range. With it's overwhelming mosquito population and oppressive heat, Louisiana was a pretty awful place to put a drive-in. I specifically remember an all-night showing of all five Planet of the Apes movies. I think the mosquitoes sucked me dry before we got to the second.

There were also still people living in campers of the parking lot of the damaged Wal-Mart. They slowly began to drift away during our time there.

After I had cleaned out the shed in the previous week, I noticed that large clumps of wasps would gather in the crevices between the ceiling and wall after dark. Having bitter memories of wasp stings from my youth (including getting stung on the lip the day before the start of 5th grade), I purchased a Raid fumigator and released it just after dusk.

The folks were back in De Ridder and I was in the back room for the night.

Next: Monday, November 7, 2005