All Bus Up

“If it works, and it’s in Puna, it’s worth something,” Tom says to me. I laugh, but I don’t believe it. “It’s all bus up!” I say.

Tom is here disconnecting the old stove that came with this house, and installing a longer propane line and an electricity box for the new one we bought, which is being delivered this afternoon.

The windows are open as they always are, and we can just hear a bulldozer rattle and clank down the road.

Last year I was pioneer woman breaking new ground, moving to Hawaii, living off-grid, baking dozens and dozens of cookies in an all bus up stove. This year I’m getting a new stove.

All bus up is my favorite Pidgin phrase. When we bought the house, we tried to make their lawn mower and string trimmer part of the deal. The seller said, “Sure, you can have the mower, but the string trimmer is all bus up.”

I love how it sounds, how it makes me smile when I hear it again. Lawn-mowers, string trimmers – all bus up! Store-bought eggs, all bus up! This ancient, rusted stove is not literally all bus up, but it’s pretty far gone. There is just no way it’s worth anything. I would feel guilty even giving it away on Craigslist.

The Bearded One and Tom almost can’t get the stove out because of the window ledge.

It must have been here for at least 20 years, since the house was built. And now, it’s in the middle of the kitchen floor. Rusted sides, one lone non-sooty functional burner, a long-stopped clock (6:30), and a choking brown dust layer on the floor beneath the oven.

Bulldozer treads bang in the distance, metal plates on solid rock. There is no soil here. Not 8/10 of a mile from the ocean. This 500-year-old lava is virtually brand new. Pahoehoe (puh-hoy-hoy) lava flows pile up, and composting takes eons. I’ve watched the bulldozer work. A brown man in a bright blue shirt drives the bulldozer back and forth, over and over and down and around the bus up lava rock, grooming it to build, breaking it down into workable size chunks for altering the rough landscape into a big pool table.

This is not how our place was done, by a long shot.

I set to work cleaning the floor and wall and anything else that needs it as I wait for the promised phone call from the Home Depot delivery man saying, “We’ll be there in half an hour.” The Bearded One doubts it’ll all work out as promised. It rarely does here.

Finally the phone rings. It’s them! What? The man who was supposed to convert the gas jet to propane didn’t get the message?

He will do the conversion on Monday? They deliver to the other side of the island on Tuesdays. Wednesdays they don’t deliver. She apologizes, but the plan is all bus up and we won’t get our new stove until Thursday, five days away.

“No stove for five days!” I say to Tom a few minutes later. I hang my head. “What I would give to have the old one back.”

He smiles. “It’s already hooked up. I just used your new connections. You can have it back now.”

I laugh, deeply relieved. It’s still working. Kind of like the whole world. Even if it’s all bus up.

The Sorting

The large cardboard box labeled BOOKS has been sealed tight with packing tape for seven years.  The Bearded One hauls it inside from the red storage shed along with dozens of other boxes, but this is the one I dread.  It’s big and heavy and ancient history.

“Where do you want this?” he asks.

“I don’t,” I say.

I am setting up the house like a thrift store, taping signs to the wall — Le Cuisine, Le Toilette, Le Boutique (two of our kids are in France at the moment…) — to make it fun and easy for my sister, mother, daughter and her husband when they come tomorrow to take what they want.

Shipping to Hawaii is expensive.  We don’t want to take our life’s accumulation anyway, so we are sorting, distributing, recycling, dumping, and generally moving most all of our furniture and household possessions to their next level.  All, that is, except a single 4’x4’x4′ pallet of choice items which will cost $425 to ship, and our 1991 Toyota 4-Runner that we hope will last until we die.  Its postage is $2300.

Family heirlooms like the sewing chair, Grandma’s card table, and the photo albums are priceless and easy and have already been claimed and tagged.  Gowns from both my weddings, the Bearded One’s bomber jacket, and the stained glass window he made may have some emotional value, maybe not.  Vases, casserole dishes, candlesticks, games, two library walls of books.  It all must go.

“It’s just shameful,” says the Bearded One as he makes another trip to the shed, “how much of my crap there is.  I guess I must have thought that the Smithsonian was eventually going to call and ask for all my childhood personal effects.”

Me, too, I think.  I have my Santa letters from 1960.  Do I chunk them?  I’ve got the writer’s disease, I’ve kept it all.  My career has been about paper.  Our eldest daughter reports that one of her first big words was “Manuscript”.  The Bearded One says we could build a house of manuscripts in Hawaii.

Now I’m alone in the upstairs bedroom where I’m making piles for each of the three kids, plus Mom and my sister.  And the time has finally come. I weigh the storage costs, the box contents, the value of a life.  I slice the tape with scissors.  I lift the cardboard top and look down at a familiar children’s book cover published in the spring of 1986.  My first book.

What’s that smell?  Musty.

The spine is slightly warped, the paper lush and fuzzy with mildew.  Whoa, I think, surprised.  Welcome to the Pacific Northwest.  Mold dots the pages.   They’re all this way.  “What luck!” I say, ecstatic that there is no decision to make.

Growth has occurred, they are all ruined, and I can return these decomposing books to the earth from whence they came.