'Ah, could have been worse. Look at the ears!'

Our cat Dulcé had a stroke.

That was one theory. More likely, said another vet, it was an ear infection. For two months, the poor thing was nauseous, barely able to walk, eat or drink. When she tried jumping onto a couch or a table, more often than not, she'd miss, thumping onto the floor in an undignified lump. My mother ended up piling mounds of cushions near the cat's favorite spots, hoping to make the landing softer. Mothers are good like that.

Whatever the cause, Dulcé, now walks around with her head tilted sideways at a forty-five degree angle, appearing as if constantly puzzled, looking at us in askance: why am I this way?

'What's the use of a good quotation if you can't change it?'

I've come home for Christmas and find myself meeting her gaze again. I look back and mentally answer, Sweetie, you're so asking the wrong person.

But, if nothing else, she seems okay, an avid fan of yarn and all things catnip, so that part of the house is fine. The rest... sigh.

'I think the nose is a definite improvement. As for the ears… well, I'm not too sure. Tell me quite frankly, what do you think of the ears?'

After thirty long years, it seems, my parents have reached a sort of detente with the dishwasher machine. For the first few decades, my family expected it to do as it was made: wash. Make things clean. Naturally, we never rinsed the dishes first, as after all, is this not the domain of the dish 'washer'? Now, after our years of disrespect, it is fighting back. My parents, now retired and moving much slower, still feed it tribute after tribute of mugs, crusted plates and spoons enameled with various sauces and jams, but it no longer washes the tableware so much as apply a thin, uniform tan patina upon everything, resting snugly at the bottom of the coffee mugs and speckling the sides of the clear glasses. It is as if, with every load, a large grapefruit has exploded, plastering everything with frozen bits of opaque gunk.

My parents refuse to be out-guilted by an appliance. Instead, they simply take each 'washed' piece out of the machine and place them in the cupboards, never admitting their defeat.

Every Christmas I block out the first hour or two in order to hand wash each glass. I am not an anal person. I am, in fact, a slob. Laundry spends more time curled up in sinuous lumps on my floor than in the hamper. But there are limits. Yet, despite my efforts, I am a co-conspirator in this war waged over the years. I, too, make no comment on the situation, instead silently stacking the dryer rack with thirty sparklingly clean glasses that are mysteriously shelved sometime later. No thank you is given, as, after all, nothing actually happened. The glasses were, of course, cleaned by the dishwasher in the first place.

'Sideburns – I've got sideburns. Or really bad skin.'

I blame the Catholic Church for the strange behavior of my family, but I'm not sure why. My family has long abandoned faith of any kind, yet lying deep within our bones is the belief that we've done something wrong and we're not going to talk about. Or anything else uncomfortable for that matter. Ever.

After all, I'm not 'gay', per se… I'm just permanently single with a roommate.

'Feels different this time…'

Now, be sure, I'd rather be sprawled on the sofa in my sweats eating Entenmanns chocolate donuts and re-watching a Doctor Who: City of Death.

I'm cleaning this year in particular, because my brother has brought home his fiancée, Nino, from the former Soviet Republic of Georgia. She speaks Georgian, Russian and French. My brother speaks Russian, Chechnyan and English. They communicate with each other in Russian.

The rest of my family, being true Americans, speak English as-seen-on-TV.

I can't even spell Chechnyan.

Nino, like the cat, walks around our house and our little mountain town that's been smothered in two feet of snow with the same expression on her face: permanently puzzled.

Mind you, I had that same feeling the first twenty-five years of my life when faced with the same people. It wears off eventually. I just hope the cat is as lucky.

'Perhaps this is my new persona… sulky, bad-tempered.'

Driving the three hours back from the airport from Syracuse with Nino we hit a whiteout. I was driving. If 'driving' can be used to describe going fifty miles per hour along what I hoped was the highway unable to see anything further than the hood, the snow caught in the headlights looking like the static on a television screen, minus the hissing sound. To any sane person not raised in regions like this, even walking is out of the question.

Nino, apparently, is sane, because I did hear the occasional scream of terror coming from the back seat.

I'm fairly sure she's seen snow in her life before now, but I'm not actually sure.

I'm certain she's never stepping in a car with me again though.

'The arms are a bit long, but I can always take them in.'

After the dishes, I'm not sure where to start cleaning. It's hard to see the house through the eyes of a stranger, not as someone was born into it, to whom everything has been where it always has been and should be... Some things are obvious, tables seem shorter, hallways narrower and bedrooms more cramped. Dimensions are a casualty of growing up, regardless of where you are raised. If there isn't an equation in physics to account for it, there should be.

The bathroom is the most obvious offender to style and taste. First there is the lime green tiles. Then the peeling, flowered wallpaper from 1979. There are two switches on the bathroom wall, one for the light and another for the fan, embedded behind the light. The fan hasn't worked in nearly a decade, but I still flick the switch on out of habit, waiting for the muffled roar. Greeted with silence every time, I instinctively reach up as if it were a dead light bulb, stupidly wanting to change out the fan blades with shiny new ones, as if it were merely depressed and wanted a makeover in order to leap into fabulously into life once more.

I should not be let near electronic devices of any sort.

'Circular logic will only make you dizzy Doctor.'

I am in a constant dazed state whenever I return home. For some reason, after the age of twenty I developed a particularly brutal allergic reaction to my home; I should market the allergen and sell it to parents wanting to be rid of their unemployed children, still lounging around the house in their mid-twenties. As a result, on every Christmas visit, I enter a comatose state, brought about by the narcotics I take that are bright pink and sold under the guise as antihistamines.

It is in this fugue that I begin to take everything in with a sense of wonder, staring at the toilet. It is a peculiar thing, this toilet. After the handle is depressed, the water in the bowl pauses, as if asking if you're really sure that flushing is something you really want to do. Are you truly committed to this? Are you absolutely sure? Then, with something akin to a sigh, it begins to slowly swirl, ponderously at first with some disgust, or perhaps disappointment at your decision, and finally flushes, using far, far more water than any toilet has a right to use. Eventually, it begins the arduous task of refilling, with all the drama an aggrieved thespian can display when asked to do a scene, once more, with feeling.

The depression is contagious. I decide to take a shower before starting on the rest of the cleaning. Draped around the bathtub are the towels; the same ones from when I was eight, possessing a strange yellow color that oddly never seems to fade. The shower curtain is new, oddly several inches too long, trailing against my feet, clingy and treacherous in the hot spray. The Prell shampoo is there too, all nuclear green and gooey. It could be the exact same bottle from my childhood, for all I know. Nothing can kill Prell. I'm somewhat amazed my parents still have any hair left after thirty years of purging with that stuff. I can hardly get the stuff off my skin; the water is from the well, softened by bags and bags of salt in the cement. Soap thrives in such water, remaining on the skin wash after wash. No wonder the dishwasher gave up.

I turn off the taps.

I have neither the time, nor the skill to redo the bathroom. Or even know where to start.

Bear in mind, however, that it has been only seven years since I've entered the world of the Gays, a land filled with exotic taps, gleaming faucets and verde antique marble wash basins and its citizens possesses a language that the rest of humanity, or at least the straight man, only knows in passing: spigots and sconces, and… I'm afraid I don't even know the rest, but I've seen them in magazines beneath stunning pictures of twelve foot long tubs and fluffy embroidered towels resting on gold-plated towel racks.

It is only my expansive knowledge of musicals that I'm allowed to remain a member of such a critical Alternative Lifestyle. That, and perhaps, my vast collection of books in the basement, hidden beneath cardboard and lovingly entombed in Ziplock.

I face them now, my feet in thick wool socks, clad in flannel and denim, shivering in this cold room. I've given up on cleaning. Besides, there's over a foot of snow outside for Nino to stare at with wonder; the world looks sharp and pristine, new. The rest of our house serves as a nice contrast.

Two boxes. They are old computer boxes, their walls stamped to match the pattern of a cow, alternating random blobs of black and white.

Two boxes filled with hundreds of books, tapes both Beta and VHS, magazines and toys.

I'm thirty-two years old. I've worked in fifteen states and three continents on volcanoes and in landfills. In two months I'm moving to England to start graduate school. I've sold my car and furniture, all my knickknacks, sent all my potted plants loose to roam free in the great outdoors and shredded all the mail I've ever had. I have two photo albums I carried home on the plane. That's everything.

I own nothing.

Here, lurking in the basement is all that's left: my Doctor Who collection. Years worth of stuff from a cheap British TV series set in a universe of Caucasian aliens with posh accents and slightly dodgy costumes.

This weird feeling at home isn't about the state of the house or a new family member. It's about what I've been determinedly avoiding for the past ten years. It's about deciding what to do with those boxes.

Dulcé is with me, marking the boxes with her forehead and a throaty purr.

It occurs to me then, that like Dulcé, I'm not quite right.

I took a hard dose in 1986. Our television picked up four PBS stations, both US and Canadian. At the age of eleven I got the fourth, fifth, first, second and third Doctors nearly simultaneously, four days a week. Then an IV dose of the sixth and seventh as they dripped across the Atlantic.

Too much too soon.

Yet, more than the photo albums, these things represent my childhood. I can't let them go anymore than I can my memories of songs or of playing or of friends. I have no idea what will happen to them, these boxes, should I never come back. Or what to do with them when I return for the last time…

Some day, my parents will be gone. One way or another. Or I will. And this house will be sold. And then these boxes will have to be emptied. Probably by me.

I came down here to toss them. Destroy the crap stuff and sell off the rest.

And yet, staring at Dulcé who looks back at me quizzically from atop a box.

I turn away and set up the creaking stairs, the cat loping behind me taking the steps in odd, diagonal leaps.

I'm not ready yet.

'I'd like to see a butterfly fit into a chrysalis case after it spreads its wings.'

For now, I have a slightly broken kitty and a tree to decorate. So this purging of memories I also avoid, leaving the basement in its cold and concrete and I shut off the light instead of starting an auction on eBay.

There are some things that we keep intentionally in our basements, things we've put off doing, knowing someday that we'll have to take care of them, comfortable at not knowing when that time will be. We know, somehow, that when the time comes to do it, we'll need these silly material memories more than ever to support us in our time of pain, before having to let them go forever.

'Change, my dear. And not a moment too soon.'