Packing up.

There is a reason why, when her daughters have a big job to get done, we call her.

My mother is a machine.

She can clean out and pack up a basement or un-pack and organize a new kitchen like nobody's business.

We left her place after Christmas, having spent time with the whole family and she was starting to talk about getting her house ready to put up for sale.  I told her then that I'd come and spend a weekend helping her out.  We picked last weekend and I was ready to roll up my sleeves and get busy.

Except that when I arrived, she had already painted the walls in her livingroom, dining room and hallway, she had cleaned almost everything out of her ginormous unfinished basement and then painted the entire floor, had someone come and replace her bedroom carpet (only after insisting on moving the furniture out herself), and packed up bins ready to be hauled off to a storage locker.

Um, Mom, why am I here again?

Turns out that I could help her deliver a van load of old stuff to it's various new homes.  And we cleared out some stuff, got rid of some furniture, moved a few things around, went out for dinner, and enjoyed a little (or more) wine.

We spent one night going through a box of old stuff that belonged to my dad and found all sorts of treasures:

- Newspapers from July 21, 1969 - "One small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind.", Expo 67 and January 1, 2000.  As well as articles about the Royal Wedding (Charles and Diana), Diana's death, local snowstorms and floods, and Mr. Dress Up's obituary.

- A gigantic Bible:

- Various hair clippings (found in that Bible) that had to be at least 100 years old. (Kind of touching to see the care that was taken to preserve them and, yet, mostly kind of creepy).

- A Sunday School invitation (also found in the Bible) which, oddly enough, might have started our current texting shortcuts:

- A newspaper clipping about my mother's legal issues:

But the most fun of all was the carving set which came with a note in my grandmother's hand writing:

Why, oh why, have we kept such a cursed knife for all these years?

Oh, and I found my Brownie hat:

I left my mom's early Monday morning.  The house looked great, she had a couple of things that still needed to be picked up, and she figured she'd have the real estate agent come by on Thursday.  

Not sure what changed during my two-hour drive home but by the time I talked to her on Monday afternoon, she'd already called her agent, signed the papers, and there was a sign on her lawn.  

I'm telling you.  She's a machine.

I'm not sure how I'm her daughter because I need a nap just thinking about what she's accomplished.  

Fingers and toes crossed now for a painless sale.

She deserves it.