emptying

When my parents leave for a trip, they ask me to water the plants.  Well, my mother asks me, they are her plants.  My father doesn’t care either way.  I go to their house after they are gone.  I bring in the mail and newspaper.  I water the plants, which are everywhere in the house.  I pick up the clothes in my father’s bathroom, which my mother either cannot see, or cannot lean over to pick up.

My mother always leaves a note, telling me where the wills are located in case they should “take the ultimate exit” on their trip.  She says to help myself to anything in the cupboard or the fridge.  However, I know there is rarely anything to eat there.

Don’t be mistaken, the cupboards and fridge are filled to overflowing.  There is food stacked on the counter because it wouldn’t fit in the cupboard.  And there is barely enough room in the fridge to fit an apple because its so full.  But everything there is never directly edible.

In the fridge, she has jars and jars or marmalade, pickles, capers, mustard, mayonnaise, and relish.  There is wine vinegar, lemon juice, baking yeast, half sticks of butter in little plastic bags, Parmesan cheese in block and grated form.  Onions, celery, lemons, and dried up onions, celery, and lemons.  Pepperoni, string cheese, bleu cheese, Italian salad dressing, ranch dressing, caeser dressing, and maraschino cherries.  An empty can of whipped cream.  A bottle of a lemonade alcoholic drink (half empty).  A very large container with one tomato in it (rotten).

Oh yes, the rotten food.  The fridge is so full, that I spend much of my time, emptying it out into trash bags.  The pepperoni that has turned brown.  The onions in a plastic bag that have become liquid.  The spoiled half of an avocado that smells like a rotten skunk.  Curdled milk that expired last week.  Moldy cheese still in the original package (yes, I know moldy cheese is not poisonous, but moldy sharp cheddar taste like kaka).  Rotten broccoli, and the carrots that it was stored with.

They have a small three-season room that is not well heated.  So since its cold in the winter, my mother keeps food in there.  Sometimes this works, but keeping a pineapple in there for two weeks, just makes a rotten pineapple.  And more rotten broccoli.  I remember coming into their house once and it smelled like death.  I was sure someone had died in there, even though they had both gone on the trip.  The smell was coming from a giant plastic bag of onions that had liquefied while rotting, and had then broken through the bag and oozed out all over the floor.