Colonial Mold

I could smell the mold when I took the box. It’s a particular perfume that only belongs to my grandmother’s house in rural Virginia (and in very few other places: a farmhouse in Rhode Island which dates back a couple hundred years, and wafting down a corridor in the Zona Colonial in the Dominican Republic, established in the 1500’s.)

It is old mold. It is what I now think of as colonial mold. And it is following me.

The nice man Joe had called from Fed-Ex saying he feared he had a bad address, that my house number did not seem to exist, and I was comforted by that, but still felt I had to give him the correct address. Joe is just the messenger, the cheerful messenger, oblivious to the consternation the contents might cause. He totes the unmarked box innocently.

I am thinking of trying to get a restraining order against my past.
Maybe a retraining order. I feel harassed; I want to be left alone. Want to hang up my cloak of genetics and last name and certain extended family, and to retreat, but the deeper I retreat, the more shocked I am at what can still find me.

Yesterday, like every week, I was being followed by documents that should go to my biological father, but since he has been seriously disabled for almost ten years, these things follow me like nests of irritated and persistent hornets.

What just turned up?
Well, at the door it was two mink coats.

On the phone, there were two callers. One was someone who wanted money from my father, and one was someone who wanted to give money to my father. You would think these things would somehow balance out, but really it’s like a tornado calling on you while someone delivers to your trailer park trailer four tons of fresh fish when the power is out.
It stinks. Sometimes it’s scary. Sometimes it makes you want to abandon your home and seek asylum elsewhere.

My sister will laugh hysterically, and then smile for days. (That is until she sees I am giving the mink coats to her for Valentine’s Day.) She will say it is my own fault and she will be right, sort of. The coats did not sell at the estate sale, and they did not sell after the estate sale, and my dear cousin who gets things done said she was trying to decide what to do with them, when I suggested we just pass them around on time-share. It was a cold day. There was snow on the ground. This dialogue happened over email, where it is easy to be misunderstood. I imagined that she had some spare closet room in one of her three houses and could just quietly tuck them away so we could all forget about them and the little minks could go back to sleep. The cousin took it to mean she should immediately box them up, insure them, and ship them to me in NJ.
I was sort of shocked speechless.

I have been stalked by the furry souls of old mink.