FD, IA - Now the House

On Sunday, the day after the visitation, the family gathered in his home to begin the inevitable process of cleaning out the house. Gary’s father might have had a will, have planned his visitation and have planned several bequests but about the house, he always said: ‘I’ll leave that for you kids.’ And he did. And, here we are.

Lug and his wife, Darlene, had lived in this house for 50 years and, though Lug had built many cubbies over the years, he had never built too many to hold all they had to put in them. In other words, there’s a lot here, pictures on the walls, knick-knacks on the furniture, things in every drawer, shelf, cupboard, enough linens for a motel, and paperwork, oh, my, the man had paperwork. Tom, one of Gary's brothers-in-law, says that whatever space a person has - he will fill it. He must have been speaking about Lug. Here’s Gary trying to get the furthest stack of dishes out of the bottom cabinet corner in the kitchen.

Samantha and Adam, Lug’s grandchildren and Dawn's children, scurried around the house and pulled all the pictures off the walls and all the knick knacks off the furniture and piled them in several piles. Dawn and Cathy, Gary’s sisters, went through the closets and piled the clothing aside for Goodwill. Tom, Dawn’s husband, loaded up their Tahoe and made several trips to Goodwill. I worked in several rooms pulling things out for Dawn, Cathy and Gary to review to decide whether to keep it themselves, take to Goodwill or try to sell later. Gary and I also worked on baskets of paperwork that was on Lug’s office table.

Lug saved an enormous amount of paperwork. We found such things as the account books that he and Darlene, his wife of 55 years, had from the first years of their marriage. We can tell you how much they earned, how much they spent on groceries on a weekly basis and how much they paid the hospital for Gary’s birth. They paid $8.00 a week in rent for the first apartment they had. WOW. Amazing. As I was going through lots of this, I’d yell ‘Memory Alert’ and show them whatever I had found. I found Dawn’s early organ lessons, I found Cathy’s 3rd grade cookbook.

Obviously, Cathy, Dawn and Gary were terribly interested in all of this type of paperwork that he had accumulated. We also found lots of letters and newspaper clippings and other types of paperwork that we were able to put into the recycling pile right away.

Dawn’s family left the on Monday but Gary, Dawn, Cathy and I stayed on for another day sorting, piling and taking to Goodwill.

We got lots done but there is still lots to do.

On Wednesday, Gary and I headed back to Des Moines to try to straighten our house there. We hadn’t had much time to put our RV things away and had piles of things around this house too.

We also had to move the RV into its storage location in a town about 15 miles away. We had left it in our driveway in our development as we had rushed off to Fort Dodge. We knew we had to move it soon since it is a tad large.