Moving

A set of dark old dressers (one low and long, one tall and narrow) stand naked on the grass, grasping FREE signs between the teeth of their emptied drawers like shy hookers posing for passing traffic. I was a young girl when my great-grandmother, Sunny, died and my parents inherited these bedroom bureaus, but I still remember how my mother wept beside me at the funeral: her shoulders shuddering; soft wails escaping; her cheeks wet and smeared.

Now a young woman, I am like an impatient rapist, stripping my great-grandmother's furniture of jewelry boxes, piles of old birthday cards and those photo booth pictures we took at that arcade in New York. Ravagingly, I rip, pull and pile their colorful cotton insides -my crumpled wardrobe- from their dinged and dented drawers, flinging everything into mounds to be dumped, donated or folded into suitcases.

Violently, it feels, I lighten the load of our vagabond lives, abandoning things and their heavy emotional attachments. Things are just things, I doubtfully repeat. I have not pimped my deceased great-grandmother out for FREE.