She�s not really my aunt � she�s my mom�s best friend since�.well, forever, really�.I�d say at least forty years because they were friends before my parents got married, and my parents have been married for over 38 years.
She�s also quite insane.
She�s been living by herself in some rundown rental, subsisting on the $600 per month alimony her ex-husband had been sending her for over 20 years. So far as I know, she�s never worked a day in her life. She also never remarried, out of spite, she admits, for if she had remarried, her ex would no longer have to pay her alimony.
At any rate, the ex (Michael) died a few years ago. Per their divorce settlement, she received $100,000 from his life insurance, which SHOULD have been enough for her to live on until she was old enough to start collecting on his social security.
Unfortunately, no one accounted for her children � her son primarily. He kept borrowing more and more and more money from her with promises to pay her back. He even told her last year that he would pay her rent for her.
He never did, and her savings dwindled, until, by the end of last week, she had less than $100 in the bank. (By the way, she was looking for work, but she lived in a college town, with no job skills and a total lack of �polish��she had no hope of competing with the college kids�.she couldn�t even get a job as a greeter at Wal-Mart)
We all knew this was coming, me, Mom, Dad and De, so it really wasn�t a surprise when Mom told us LAST weekend that she would be bringing De home to live with us THIS weekend. She had no where else to go. She couldn�t move in with her son because her daughter-in-law is allergic to cats and she couldn�t move in with her daughter because her son-in-law would not allow her to bring the cats.
She was very upset about it � hysterical really. She hates the thought of being a burden and giving up her independence. Mom said she spent several hours on the phone with her each night, trying to soothe her. De herself has stated she was �frozen with fear.�
But � I�m not sure whether that really an excuse for what happened this weekend when we moved her.
My mother and brother drove down to Salisbury with a moving van. Greg said when they walked in the house, Mom started crying immediately, asking �How are we going to do this?� See, we had been led to believe that, beside a few pieces of furniture, De didn�t really have a lot to move. (Which would have been a good thing, had it been true. Mom and Dad have a small two bedroom and den condo. Once De and the cats were added to the household, that would make us a family of four adults and seven cats)
Not only did De had A LOT to move, NONE of it was packed. NOTHING. Greg and Mom and my cousin Yvonne did the best they could with shopping bags and garbage bags, but quite a lot of stuff was just tossed into the van with no packaging whatsoever.
Dave came over yesterday morning to help Greg and I unload the truck, and Greg warned him before opening the van, �Stand back when you open it�. I thought he was exaggerating.
He wasn�t.
As soon as Dave lifted the back door, things started spilling out on him. Imagine if someone had lifted her house and dumped its contents out the front door and into the truck. That�s what it looked like when we went to unload it.
So, after much bitching and moaning, we finally got to work. The first item I brought up was a small box fan which Auntie De said that she didn�t want and if no one else wanted it, we could throw it out. No one did, so we pitched it. She said that she was probably going to end up throwing out a lot of her stuff, since Mom certainly didn�t have room for it. I suggested she come downstairs with us so she could identify trash BEFORE we dragged it up the stairs�.and then she started crying again, so I let it go.
Among the stranger items they packed:
Two empty cat litter boxes (I don�t mean a litter box, I mean the box the litter is sold in)
A cinder block (supposedly, a spice grinding tablet)
Dirt in a pot (�but that�s Long Island dirt�, Greg said. My grandparents, the originators of the dirt pot, haven�t lived in Long Island for over ten years)
A pork tenderloin (�Hey, look! We�ve got meat,� Dave exclaimed)
A three foot tall plastic storage unit � which wasn�t so strange in and of itself � but it was COVERED in fur and assorted cat flotsam and jetsam
And then, last night, after De had a chance to start going through it, I made about twenty trips back down to the dumpter.
(Incidentally, my first plan, when I was told that she wanted to get rid of a lot of stuff, was to sell it on eBay. That was before I actually saw how much stuff she had and how�cruddy�it all was. At that point, it just became a matter of getting it out of the house as quickly as possible, My mother�s living and dining rooms are currently impassable)
