One Red Tulip Survived
By: Aj Wood
Tags: Symbolism, Personal Growth, Hope, Hoarding, Change

No matter the situation, there’s always hope

Photo by fotografierende on Unsplash

Ex Number Two’s house was trashed. Literally. In 2002, there had been a house fire. The story goes that when the guy was away on one of his business trips, his daughter threw a load of clothes in the dryer and went out to help her mother deliver their morning newspapers. No, this paper route didn’t belong to the daughter. It was the wife’s part-time job, and she roped her kids into helping her. You see, they were destitute, poor things. According to the yarns she spun for the neighbors her husband refused to work, and she did the best she could to hold her family together. Though the neighbors watched Ex Number Two leave the house every morning and return in the evening, and listened to long-winded tales of his escapades around the water-cooler, they didn’t think he actually had a job. His wife had convinced everyone that she was running the house with the income from a paper route.

What really boggles my mind is that no one ever seriously questioned the woman’s story. I suppose it was the condition of the house, and the fact that Ex Number Two (indeed, the entire family) proudly presented themselves to the world as homeless bums. One day a friend said, “I just don’t understand. My nephew has the same type of job Ex does, and he makes good money.” When I told her that Ex Number Two made over $80,000 a year, she was blown away. And she didn’t believe me. “But his wife told me…” she said, aghast. I guess that’s what they call cognitive dissonance.

Anyway, when wife and daughter got back from delivering papers on that ill-fated morning, the house was filled with smoke. Nobody had ever thought to clean the lint trap in the dryer, and it had ignited. Wife stood in the center of the lawn staring stupidly at the smoke billowing out the front door, daughter ran across the street to call 911, and Ex returned the next day to find that all his books (enough to fill a typical kids’ section in the library) had been destroyed with smoke and water damage. “We need to throw them out,” the fire marshal told him. Ex screamed, “No!” and spent a week carefully cataloging and boxing up each and every book, and stacking them neatly into one side of his two-car garage.

The man refused to throw anything away. When I arrived on the scene ten years later, I found a mountain of garbage bags piled against the wall of a storage room. I was surprised to find them stuffed with squashed aluminum cans and flattened cereal boxes. I lifted a box, cocoa puffs I think it was, and shook my head in disbelief. Why, I wondered, would he hold onto this? Ex Number Two grabbed it out of my hands and told me of the day, about five years before, he had gotten a hankering for cocoa puffs; how he had searched for the cereal among all the others on the store shelf; how many people were in line ahead of him at the cash register, and the items in their carts; how much he had paid for his cereal, including tax; the bowl he had selected to eat it from, and the reasons for his choice; the snap, crackle, pop sound as he poured on the milk; the way it felt sliding down his throat. His face glowed as he relived the experience, but my stomach started churning as it does when something is wrong. I had no clue what to make of this. Somehow, Ex Number Two’s emotions seemed connected to that piece of cardboard. The hurt in his eyes was unmistakable. How dare I even consider throwing it away!

Buried as I was in thirty years of accumulated treasure, I lacked the patience, and the PhD in abnormal psychology, to care. The next day, a few minutes after he had left for work, I unceremoniously chucked the cereal boxes out for the garbage collectors. That’s about the time Ex Number Two quit trusting me, for reasons that made perfect sense to him. Every garbage day after that, instead of heading straight to work when he left the house, he circled around to the back and hid just out of sight. Then, after I had done what one normally does with garbage, he opened each bag and rummaged among the potato peels and egg shells to retrieve his memories. He told the next door neighbor that he had made a mistake marrying someone who was so heartless and cruel.

He might have been right. One thing became clear as I tried to shovel out of Ex Number Two’s priceless collections. We didn’t agree on the definition of the word “valuable.” He thought cereal boxes should be saved and treasured like old family photos. I thought they were good kindling for those bonfires they set at the city dump. He was perfectly at ease sitting among boxes, papers, and broken toys stacked to the ceiling. I found it impossible to stay clean among the rubble, and didn’t like living like a sewer rat. Everyday life became a case study in Darwinian survival. I found it stressful, to say the least.