26 September 2021

Charlotte Works Magic

…At Refuge Farm. The detritus of five or six moves was not stacked- but jammed in the garage. Charlotte is a recent widow, plucky lady, looking for work, and partnered with our Realtor Maggie to clean out #109 at Big Pink up in Arlington. When she moved more debris down to The Farm and saw the state of the garage, she asked if we might need some help in policing it up and getting ready to let it all fly out there to the trash (all the Harvard books you taxpayers paid for, new!), and charity, and what would be left to the kids to say “We don’t have room for this crap! Dad, why did you leave all this stuff!”

At least we can see it all now. And I remembered why we kept it in the soft bright enveloping glow of an early Fall morning in Virginia’s Piedmont, where the Irish ancestor’s worked on the Alexandria-Orange Railroad in 1858. Grandpa’s Grandpa died swinging a hammer on the track that led west from Gordonsville, VA to Nashville, Tennessee. His son became an Irish Confederate. My side of the Irish went to Ohio and joined the Union…but decided my Grandma’s Grandma was worth deserting to stay with after his first enlistment was up.

So, she worked her magic on another man’s trash. The stuff we agreed was trash. The rest of the relics and memories, once those memories are gone with me, will be somebody else’s trash…

Copyright 2021 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com