Many years ago, my husband coined a term, “Crap Collection Centers.” He shortened it to CCC’s, and he employed it whenever a flat surface began to accumulate stuff. Back then, we didn’t have children. We were able to stay (somewhat) ahead of the disorder of blocks and school papers and markers and dolls and dirty dishes and on and on. Our kids are going away for the weekend, so I have asked Peter for an hour today and an hour tomorrow to try to deal with the CCC’s. We’ll move the blocks to the basement and vacuum the cat hair and file some of the school papers and finally move the summer clothes to the basement. 

Penny had bought the house in 1986, when she and the boys moved back to New Orleans. From outside, the blue stucco dwelling looked grim. It squatted like a sumo wrestler between its neighbors. The roofline slanted so dramatically that little light pierced the front windows, but inside, butter-colored walls, hardwood floors, and high ceilings made up for the lack of sunshine. Upon closer inspection, a visitor would notice the details–faded curtains and stained upholstery, paint peeling away from the walls, a fireplace that seemed to have settled into the soggy ground more on one side than the other. The furniture looked tired. Mildew speckled the hallway, mice droppings lurked among kitchen drawers and cabinets, fungus covered the deck and made it too slippery to walk upon. Peter coined a term that day to describe all the flat surfaces in the house. “Crap Collection Centers, also known as CCC’s,” he remarked, as we tried to bring order to the pens, markers, coins, beads, candy, extension cords, and paper clips that littered desks, countertops, tables.

Over the course of the morning, more friends filed inside. Word of Penny’s cancer had spread, and the well-wishers got to work. Sam was in charge. When Penny had said, “I trust you,” she meant it. At first, he asked her before making any changes. But after she insisted, for the fourth time, that he had full authority, he believed her. He pushed his sleeves to his elbows and grinned: “In that case…”

He employed Peter and William, Penny’s brother, to enact his vision. They followed Sam’s beckoning hand and carried sofas, chairs, coffee tables, mirrors, and paintings from room to room until Sam was satisfied he had found the proper configuration. It reminded me of a children’s story, with Sam as the fairy godmother waving a wand to perform magic.

Susan took care of the details. With her short red hair tucked behind her ears, she leaned over Penny’s desk and spent half an hour testing pens and markers to see if they still had ink in them. “So satisfying,” she said, as she scribbled on a white piece of paper and lobbed one after another into a trash can nearby. Next, Susan and I stuffed old clothes, mildewed books, broken appliances, tattered sheets, and broken blinds into oversized black garbage bags. Outside, we gathered and stacked seventeen clay pots, filled with soil and dried-up plants.

Penny’s sister Leelee arrived in the late morning dressed in jeans and a T-shirt, ready to help. … I hadn’t expected her presence at Penny’s house that morning, nor her attitude. She hugged Penny when she walked in the front door and then turned to Sam.

“Put me to work,” she said. And before long, Leelee had assumed control of cleaning the deck. After assembling a team, she gathered rubber gloves and a bucket of bleach and water. She crouched down and began to scrub.

“This is incredible,” Penny murmured, watching her older sister on her hands and knees, wiping sweat from her face, scraping through years of grime to uncover the original wooden surface.

At the end of the day, Sam assessed our work. The house looked brighter. The paint still curled away from the wall, and the fireplace sagged, but the rooms looked cared for, refreshed. “Flowers!” he proclaimed. He paused and looked around. In the front of the house, over the fireplace, hung a charcoal portrait of Penny. “A shrine,” he announced. “A shrine of flowers to Penny.” He took the bouquets that had arrived more or less every hour, and redistributed them along the mantle among ten vases of colored glass. Sam kissed Penny on the cheek with a large smack, “All right, dahling, take care of yourself. Love yourself and do not be afraid. Jesus is with you, dahling. Jesus is here.”

Susan didn’t offer words of condolence. She generally used large gestures to express herself–arms stretched wide before a hug, hands moving wildly to narrate a story–but that afternoon she simply grasped her friend’s hand and looked her in the eyes. “I love you, Penelope,” she said.

“Thank you,” Penny replied. “Thank you all.”