Eldest daughter has been helping me pack boxes. So far, her ratio is about one to my eight, but never mind: you've got to start somewhere. And at the end of every day, we each have a pile of junk that we are loath to recognize as such.
"Let's face it," I tell eldest, staring in dismay at her monstrous collection of toiletries, "you're never going to use half of that stuff."
She stares down at the drawers her dozens upon dozens of bottles and jars are virtually spilling out of, her features tight with denial. "I might."
I cross my arms over my chest and sigh. "It's all old stuff anyway; you might as well throw it all out."
She frowns and presses her lips together. "But it's still good."
I pick up a bottle of lurid pink, full-strength body spray 1/8 full. "You're telling me you want to keep this?" I'm not a big fan of body spray.
"Mom, you can go now," she says, but I'm on a roll.
"And this?" I query, holding up a bottle of shampoo with two inches left.
"Mom!"
So help me, we could open our own hairwashing salon here. I don't know what there is about using up the last few centimeters of shampoo, but not one person in this family seems able to do this. When I was cleaning out the bathroom, I counted almost two dozen bottles with only a smidgen of shampoo left in each one, but eldest takes it to a new plane entirely. I'm not telling how many almost-empty shampoo bottles she has; I'm trying to convince myself I must have imagined it.
"You're not going to want to see this stuff in a year's time. You're not going to want to lug it all to your dormitory now, are you?"
She sticks her lower lip out and glowers at the jumble of bottles and jars. She knows I'm right.
Later on, though, she catches me sitting there, reading picture books. We've got what I'm certain is one of the biggest Japanese picture book collections in Scotland. "Remember this one about the oni who eats donuts and chocolate and green peppers and spaghetti?" I say fondly, showing eldest the picture. She scrunches up her face and rolls her eyes, but I know she does remember. She's not ready to throw that one away.
"What are those?" she asks, pointing her foot at the pile of notebooks in one corner.
They are my guilty secret: I've saved all the homework she did in elementary school, in Japan. I fished her completed notebooks out of the trash when we were moving from Japan to the U.K. All of her carefully formed hiragana and katakana, every childishly-penned kanji with its precise stroke order: how could I just throw those notebooks away?
She bends down for a closer look, recognition beginning to dawn. "Those are my old notebooks, aren't they?"
"Maybe."
She has a look of triumph in her eye. "You saved them."
"Only a few."
"Like anybody's ever going to use them!" She picks one up and looks at it, her lip curled.
I took a break and washed the clothes. Eldest hung them out on the radiators, then we lugged a huge pile of things down to Oxfam in the car. When we got back, the whole house smelled like Herbal Essence shampoo.
"What's that smell?" asked eldest, looking around. "Isn't that Herbal Essence shampoo?"
I nodded. "I washed the laundry with it. It seemed a shame to waste it."
Eldest sat back in her chair. "You washed the clothes with shampoo? You've got to be kidding!"
"No, I'm not. We were running low on laundry detergent and I had a bottle with about two inches of shampoo in it, so I figured why not? Anyway, it did the job."
She shook her head and grinned. "Mom, you're a genius!"
"Aw, shucks."
"No, really! And I know what I'm going to do with all that stuff upstairs now!"
Oh God: the house is going to reek for the next few days. What have I done? Still, it's freezing cold outside. The picture books have been safely boxed away, but her old notebooks will make a nice, toasty fire.
