The Things We Keep
“Do you want anything?” she asks, as I stand in a pile of odds and ends collecting dust for the past fifty years.
The things I do want, old photos, home movies, my Cabbage Patch doll, have all been destroyed by the flood. What remains are ugly vases, candlesticks, a bust, a portrait of a stranger. Items that have always remained quietly in the background of my life but never made imprints on my heart.
I have no attachment to anything. I’m twenty-eight years old. My father is gone. My brother is struggling. My mother is flailing. My marriage is scrambling. I don’t care about things. I don’t care about the candelabra that sat on our table every holiday. I don’t need an 82-piece complete set of silverware. I have nowhere to put any of this junk!
I’ve just finished reading Marie Kondo’s Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up. I am decluttering my life. Not adding to it. There is no joy found in the wooden table where we placed our nativity set every Christmas. There is no joy in the crystal vase that held Pussy Willows from the garden.
There is no joy. Home lost its meaning years ago. Everything else lost to flood or foreclosure or to a crooked antique dealer on the lam. What’s left is a sad collection of my mother’s life, and I want none of it. I want none of her.
I’m angry with her for ruining everything. For taking what was ours and trashing it. Losing it. Losing herself. I’m so mad at her for losing herself. I needed her to hold it together. I hate being the strong one. I hate being the one who fixes things. The one who organizes all the chaos. I hate the chaos. I hate this house, and I hate these things. Just pack it up fast and be rid of it all!
I drive home with a trunk full of randomness. My great-grandmother’s china set. A teapot. A vase. My father’s letter opener. They remain boxed. Unopened for years while I heal.
I’m in my forties now. My mother is gone, leaving me the matriarch. The title feels heavy and pregnant with duty. I’m also pregnant with a child. A child who will never know my parents. He’s going to grow up in a foreign place, detached from our origins. I feel a deep desire to keep the delicate strings of our family history attached. I want him to feel grounded and rooted in where he comes from despite where he is. I want to create an environment that marries both the new and the old. I’m obviously nesting!
I find an old box in the back of his future bedroom closet. It’s full of the last remaining trinkets from my mother’s life. It’s the china I rolled my eyes at as she delicately packed it away. The random teapot I told her I’d never use. The very first toy I ever received, a yellow crocheted giraffe! My eyes widen. We painted Nolan’s room yellow last night! The giraffe finds a beautiful home on his freshly hung shelf. The china is washed and used that Thanksgiving. I kick myself for not taking the silverware on that fateful day I told her I wanted nothing.
The black teapot and I both find our place; the teapot on my dining room breakfront. As I take back the margins of my life, everything slows down just enough for me to breathe and reflect. I have time to care for the last remaining pieces of my childhood. To repair a diamond ring my mother wore every day. To read a book that sat on our shelves all my life.
I take the black teapot and start small, rubbing away decades of dirt and grime, tarnish and the residue of neglect. Each gentle circle recalls a fight with my mother, now long forgiven. A resentment now lost to time. The complicated relationship between mother and daughter reflects back at me as the black gives way to the silver underneath.
These things I scoffed at. These precious pieces whose value my anger insisted on clouding have become my most delicate few possessions. Standing in her living room, surrounded by piles of pain and cardboard, I would never have believed I’d mourn the vases that sat on our piano. Or the crystal glasses we would raise at every celebration. That twenty-something-year-old would never have believed I’d forgive my mother and want to share the pieces of her that still remain in me.
It’s amazing what a little polish can do.
