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Hello Dear People,
I wonder why there are not more novels written to explore our complicated relationship with stuff. Material things. Our belongings. What we work so hard to buy. Or the little, accidental things that have no value really. A first date and a coin toss at a county fair that won a glass mug. Fifty-five years later, all the drama is long past. The marriage at age nineteen, the coming out, the confusion, pain, rage, divorce, an early morning call decades later: dead of AIDS at 42. It’s so far removed from today, it’s just a report. Just the facts, ma’am. And yet, here’s the cup, the county fair, the heady Ferris wheel and . . . the falling . . .
I am cleaning out my mom’s house, which she hasn’t lived in since she fractured her back six years ago. For 18 months she lived in a retirement home before I sprung her out and whisked her off to Italy. But now, finally, she is ready to sell this house. Her memories. My memories.
Her mind still works pretty well, but her world has shrunk to a perimeter of hearing aid batteries, Kleenex, and where is my ChapStick?
I put a butter dish into her hands—a round one like the kind they used when butter was taken out of the churn and molded into a round block with a design on top. “Whose was this?”
“I don’t remember.”
She seems not to care that she can’t remember, which amazes me. She always knows what day it is and who’s the president and all the other questions they ask when looking for symptoms of dementia. She always knows. But she can’t remember if this was my great-grandmother’s butter dish or one she picked up at a garage sale.
“We should have done this ten years ago,” she says. “When I could still remember.”
We didn’t do it years ago because she would not. It would just have been too painful. Then, she would have remembered the butter dish and all the memories it carried, as I remember the cup won at the county fair. So, while I feel a loss at not knowing if this is a family butter dish, I’m almost glad that she can’t remember and that she doesn’t care that she can’t remember. It’s part of the letting go and a step into wisdom.
A child of the depression, my mom carefully worked the economic opportunities this country presented in the ‘60s and ‘70s. She scrimped and bought a house and sold it for a profit. And another. And another. She supplemented my dad’s police salary with part time work and then full time work and then a true career.
She subscribed to Better Homes and Gardens when a magazine subscription was a luxury. She got silver-plated flatware and wheat pattern dishes with Green Stamps. I remember pasting the stamps into the books until their pages were so stiff they stood up, and then going with her to the redemption center to pick up the treasures she had so carefully chosen to make our tiny house in Ozark, Arkansas as close as she could get it to Better Homes and Gardens.
She was so frugal, she always ate soup at a restaurant, but she was willing to spend some money to make a home, considering every purchase an investment and using those things for a lifetime. Nothing in her house was disposable. Nothing ever changed. Whoever buys this house will probably gut it, unless they want white Formica and a coppertone range. We have enough solid, hard rock maple furniture to build an ark. And it all had to match perfectly. There was no tolerance for “natural variations.” Whenever she went furniture shopping, she wagged in a drawer from her dresser to match the color. When they delivered a piece, if it had a scratch the width of a hair, back it went. Then, in the ‘80s, she built on an addition, and, in that, she switched to oak.
Now, it doesn’t much matter that all the solid hard rock maple matches, that it still, after decades, has no scratches. The auction company won’t be that concerned when they load it onto the truck.
The question I keep asking myself is: why do we care so much? Why do we feel pure grief for the loss of this stuff? Why do we give things such power over us? Why do they seem alive? Yesterday, as I put a set of salt and pepper shakers into the sale box, I imagined the salt shaker looking at me in horror. “Not us! We’re family.”
The salt shaker doesn’t even have a face. It’s the shape of a radish.
“Stop talking,” I said. “You’re ceramic, made in China. You are not alive.”
I might be going a little crazy.
But really, what makes us feel this attachment to things that are not family heirlooms, not expensive, but only cheap stuff we bought ourselves?
Then, it all became clear to me in a flash of insight when a friend happened (thank you, Spirit) to read a poem to me, “Welcome Morning” by Anne Sexton, who begins the poem by saying, “There is joy in all:” And then she lists the ordinary things she encounters each morning. “. . . in the outcry from the kettle that heats my coffee each morning, in the spoon and the chair that cry ‘hello there, Anne’ each morning . . .”
And I realized suddenly that we love these things for the weight of the memories they invoke. Like the cup from the county fair carries its memories, so, too, does the salt shaker. Not dramatic memories like the cup, but the fossilized imprint, deepened by decades of repetition, of all the meals in which the salt shaker has participated. Ordinary meals hardly to be called meals. A tomato sandwich wolfed down on the run as I worked round the clock to start a business here in my mom’s town. “I was here,” the salt shaker says. “All those years . . . I was here.”
Hush.
It almost feels that if we lose the salt shaker, we lose those memories that are not memories, for I don’t remember any specific tomato sandwiches, but only the summer routine of relishing them. I don’t have specific memories (as I do with the cup from the fair) but my heart is imprinted with all those salt shaker moments, like an ancient footprint in a stone. The foot is long gone, but the print remains.
I am sentimental about the salt shaker because it was there with us through thick and thin.
But I won’t lose my history if I let the salt shaker go. Better to come now to the wisdom that my mother, at 94, is just realizing. Stuff does not matter. What matters is the life lived. I do not judge her, or myself, for putting so much time and money and thought into our stuff, but I remind us both of Jesus’ wisdom: where your treasure is, there will your heart be. Through the centuries, holy people of all persuasions warned against the addictive power of stuff—how it can possess us. (I felt a little possessed while talking to the salt shaker.)
Cleaning out Mother’s house is a giant exercise in learning to set my heart free. I’m resolved to be more thoughtful and intentional about what I buy in the future and to not let material things grow into my heart like the tendrils of an invasive vine.
“Thank you for your service,” I tell the salt shaker, “And go with God.”
Finding our stories . . . and ourselves.
Alison
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Writing Events FREE in July. We continue to offer workshops and summits from the Village Writing School archives to all newsletter subscribers!
Free Summit in July: Historical Fiction Online Summit
Free Workshop in July: Space, Time, and Magic: The Writer’s Process, with Cynthia Morris
Omg Mrs. Brown, I started crying reading this. You won’t believe this but I’m starting over with my life. It’s not easy after married 25 years. I’m working my tail off to buy another place. Well I contacted the people that bought your dads place. That’s the place I want. They did tell me they will sell one day just not sure when. So I won’t take much time off until I reach my goal of buying that place. Then for some reason I googled auctions. And boom there it was, first thing I thought was your mom. I was so relieved to see she is with you. You know I wrote a book years ago about my life? Well your dad is in it a lot. I would love to talk to you if you don’t mind? 615-420-8838. And I saw a pic of that old barn at your moms. You know how many times I milked yalls old milk cow in there? Lol hope to hear from you
Anthony Turner
Going back through emails and I had missed this. It is wonderful. I've been working to reduce the "stuff" in my life. The thoughts you share give me encouragement to part ways, and to say to things I'm hesitant to part with "Thank you for your service, And go with God.” :)