I don’t want to die with a dirty house,” my mother-in-law says to me over coffee.
I choke on mine a little bit. “Your house ain’t dirty now, Ms. Larda,” I tell her. “Plus, you ain’t dying.”
“We all die sometime,” she says. “You never know. You could plop over tomorrow.”
“And the coroner will tell everybody that my end tables needed to be dusted?”
Ms. Larda stomps off and comes back with this book — I don’t remember the exact title — but it means “Kick the Bucket in a Tidy House ” It’s about something called “Swedish death cleaning.”
Now, Ms. Larda lives in a double house, and her sons, Leech and Lurch, live on the other side. So she will actually only have to death-clean half a house.
Still. I tell her she ain’t Swedish now, and she probably won’t be Swedish when she dies.
But she is determined to organize. She invites the entire Gunch family over for Sunday dinner, and afterwards, she hands each of us a bunch of sticky dots in different colors. Then she says we are supposed to pick a color and go to each piece of furniture and put our sticky dot on it if we want to inherit it when she’s gone.
I don’t know if that’s part of the Swedish method or not, but the thing is — we all got dining room tables, and sofas and armchairs already. Plus, everybody In the family, including her, had to get new furniture after Hurricane Katrina. We all got the same kind — Cheap Modern — so we don’t need to inherit hers.
Thank God, my brother-in-law Leech speaks up. He says, “Ma, after you, with all due respect, croak, we will probably rent out your half the house. And we can charge more rent if it’s still furnished.”
Everybody jumps in quick and says what a good idea that is. So Ms. Larda nods her head and takes her labels back. Except for the 50 green ones which little Flambeau has already stuck on the kitchen table leg.
Still, nothing is going to stop Ms. Larda from Swedish cleaning. She gets busy putting stuff in giveaway boxes — her velvet Elvis pictures, her gnome collection, her clothes that are too small or too tight or too ugly to wear.
Most of the stuff she donates to charities.
Certain things that survived in the attic — like Girl Scout awards and high school yearbooks and that paper cup with a lid that turned out to be full of condoms, she puts in paper bags and abandons on family members’ front porches.
But some things — like old pantyhose and underdrawers, for instance — just got to go in the trash.
So one day she is hauling out a load of trash, and a neighbor guy about her age steps up and helps carry it out for her.
He introduces himself. His name is Lars Larson. He pronounces it “Laws Lawson,” of course, because they live in Chalmette. And the name “Laws” suits him, because he is a retired policeman.
Then, can you believe — the two of them start stepping out a little. First to the movies, with a stop by McDonald’s after. Next time they go to Pizza Hut. Then things get seriouser, I guess, because they start eating at Rocky and Carlos’s.
By then, she has eaten Italian with him so much that she is thinking in back of her mind that he is Italian. It takes her awhile to remember that Lars Larsen is actually a Swedish name.
So she asks him about Swedish death cleaning and he looks blank and finally says, “I don’t think anybody in my family does much cleaning once they’re dead. Unless they’re in Hell.”
So that does it for her death cleaning.
By now, Ms. Larda’s house is more tidy than ever.
But she decides plopping over dead ain’t required.
Thank you, God.
