{"id":463,"date":"2015-05-12T20:16:03","date_gmt":"2015-05-12T20:16:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/laurajosephart.com\/laurajosephartWP\/?p=463"},"modified":"2015-05-12T20:16:03","modified_gmt":"2015-05-12T20:16:03","slug":"clearing-houses","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/laurajosephart.com\/laurajosephartWP\/?p=463","title":{"rendered":"CLEARING HOUSES"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’m sitting here waiting on a local volunteer agency to pick up a chair, you know the drill with the three hour window. \u00a0Two weeks ago I was doing the same thing but it was a sofa, an oversized chair, and a coffee table. \u00a0The queen’s chair<\/em>\u00a0is what we used to call the oversized one, as it had once belonged to me before the dog and later the husband took it over. \u00a0I decided to get rid of all of them (the funiture that is) one fateful night in early spring while streaming some HGTV program on Netflix. \u00a0That night, lying\u00a0on the sofa, I began to notice\u00a0these wiry, curly, yellow dog hairs that only labs can grow sticking straight up out of the cushions like darts. \u00a0Moving my eyes over to the oversized chair was no better; it was noticeably sagging in the middle in the exact shape of my husband’s ass. \u00a0It all seemed particularly drab and depressing and I guess I had just had enough. \u00a0So I called.<\/p>\n

Within a few days my living room was practically empty. \u00a0The cat and I laid on the floor with a pillow for the first few nights of Masters of Sex\u00a0<\/em>but that had to end when my back seized up in rebellion. \u00a0(That thing about lying on a hard surface being good for your back is BS.) \u00a0 And I could tell that the cat missed her cozy perch on the faux fur throw that used to adorn the back cushions of the couch. \u00a0But I liked the room better; it seemed more spatial and open, as if something new could happen, as if the past were over and\u00a0the future could begin, this time without the dog, without the husband, who both passed away last year.<\/p>\n

This morning, when I returned from my daily hike, I was taking \u00a0my usual walk around my garden \u00a0when I noticed unruly piles of dead foilage mixed with shreds of plastic trash lying on the ground around the martin house. \u00a0My husband and I had bought this ultimate, luxury hotel for birds on one of our many trips to wine country in California. \u00a0It was an anniversary present to oursevles one year and we had it shipped to Ohio, had it first mounted on top of a dead tree and later\u00a0purchased a designated pole with decorative brackets on which it now rests. \u00a0Martins, however, were never attracted to it, perhaps because there are so many tall trees nearby. Instead, the delightful gold finches have made it their home for several years which means the martins will probably never come. \u00a0In either case, it is evident to me that this morning, or last night, perhaps while watching Netflix, \u00a0these feathered creatures living in my backyard in the big bird hotel had\u00a0finally\u00a0had enough. \u00a0They cleaned house. \u00a0They cleared house. \u00a0They took everything inside that structure and threw it spiritedly on the ground in disgust. \u00a0They will begin again.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’m sitting here waiting on a local volunteer agency to pick up a chair, you know the drill with the three hour window. \u00a0Two weeks ago I was doing the same thing but it was a sofa, an oversized chair, and a coffee table. \u00a0The queen’s chair\u00a0is what we used to call the oversized one, […]<\/p>\n Read More...<\/a>","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":464,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-463","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-image-and-word"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/laurajosephart.com\/laurajosephartWP\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/463","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/laurajosephart.com\/laurajosephartWP\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/laurajosephart.com\/laurajosephartWP\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/laurajosephart.com\/laurajosephartWP\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/laurajosephart.com\/laurajosephartWP\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=463"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/laurajosephart.com\/laurajosephartWP\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/463\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":466,"href":"http:\/\/laurajosephart.com\/laurajosephartWP\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/463\/revisions\/466"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/laurajosephart.com\/laurajosephartWP\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/464"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/laurajosephart.com\/laurajosephartWP\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=463"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/laurajosephart.com\/laurajosephartWP\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=463"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/laurajosephart.com\/laurajosephartWP\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=463"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}