What We Leave Behind
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| New Orleans Antique Shop, 2016 |
It’s a dream I have again and again. My grandmother’s red wooden house with the tire swing outside that was always full of wasps. Inside, rooms that unfold into other rooms that never existed. Full of shadeless lamps and boxes of photographs covered in dust. Thick curtains, a black lacquer box filled with nail polishes and tiny white sample lipsticks, all in her signature bright red. I wander through only to find yet another closet behind another closet. A hole in the wall that leads to a chamber filled with more objects. The fiddle that once hung on the wall above the black and white television set. The large atomic clock that never worked. The set of illustrated encyclopedias I inherited when she died.
After she was gone, my mother and my aunt burned most of my grandmother’s clothes in a bonfire in the yard, piling sheer robes and marabou slippers and glittering costume jewelry on the pyre. We sat in the living room with albums and boxes of photos that needed sorting. As my fingers moved over them, It was the first time I ever remember being overwhelmed by history, by objects. By the weight and volume of them. Smiling faces of strangers and family alike across decades and several states.
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In addition to the encyclopedias my mother eventually threw out decades later, I inherited an orange flower sofa that sat in our basement for years. In college, still living with my parents, I hauled it up the stairs to my room. Years later, I hauled it to an apartment with glorious floors and a sleeping porch, but had to abandon it one night when I moved rather stealthily in the night. I left the sofa, though I had once harvested a single pearl clip-on earring from its cushions. This I kept.
From my paternal grandmother, I inherited a small porcelain jewelry box with cherry blossoms. A box I have broken and glued back together after multiple mishaps. A small red diary with a kitten on it detailing the small dailyness of the last year of her life. Including passing mentions of pain and cancer diagnoses that eventually took her. For years, it remained unread.
I lost my grandparents young, but some of their style wore off on me nonetheless. My great grandmother, born in the early decades of the century, outlived her own daughter and most of the others. She wore floral dresses and cat eye glasses and reigned over a kitchen filled with jelly glasses and Folgers cans full of chocolate chip.
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When I opened a vintage and art shop online in the late aughts, I gravitated most to those things I associated with my own grandmothers. Cat eye glasses, for example, usually deadstock or ones I could clean up and repair, sold really well. Clip on costume jewelry earrings made into hair clips, brooches into headbands. I hunted and resold vintage salt and pepper shakers and dishware. Beautiful vintage handbags I wound up keeping more of than selling.
Mostly, I loved selling things even if it only meant I got to hold them for a while. That was part of the charm, my own apartment already filling with things that felt like too much. Books and dresses and art supplies. Thrifted furniture and an obscenely strange number of vintage office chairs for someone who rarely invites anyone over.
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When my mother passed away after a long and troublesome bout with both illness, injury, and wound-related hallucinations, she left behind a large collection of snowmen decorations. A cache of Chicago Bulls memorabilia collected over the years. In the thrift store, where we did the rounds every visit I made home, she once stopped pensively at the end of capper and commented how sad it was to see collections. Porcelain cats, salt and pepper shakers, novelty cookie jars. Their sheer number meant someone had, at best, unloaded them. At worst, someone had inherited them from a dead loved one and didn’t quite know what to do with them.
And now they were here.
When my father followed five years later, we cleaned out the house still stuffed with the snowmen and the Bulls memorabilia. While he had cleared out her clothing and jewelry fairly early on, he left his legacy along with hers. A drawer full of random remotes in his office and endless cords. A collection of hunting magazines and bowls full of loose change. Dozens of notebooks filled with grocery lists and horse racing stats.
As we removed items from the house, I wanted next to nothing, my own apartment already full to bursting. I took a framed watercolor floral I’d given to my mother for her birthday, one of my firsts and possibly bests. A book of bird lore I’d given to my dad on Christmas. A frame with dried flowers my mother must have thrifted. The rest was carted home by my sister or hauled away by dumpsters.
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I think about what I may one day leave behind. A stack of books, a row of dresses in the closet. More in the bins under the bed. Coats and cats and cardboard boxes filled with poem drafts from earlier years. In the digital age, many of our artifacts exist online and nowhere else. Odds and ends of poems and other kinds of writing. The blog I’ve kept since 2005 provides a pretty good history of my life. But then so do the stack of marble composition books in a drawer somewhere I journaled in through college and grad school. There are also the near obsolete things as well, videotapes and CDs. Scratchy recordings of readings here in the city. Binders filled with ephemera–ticket stubs, newspaper clippings, award certificates. One day all will likely be gathered up in boxes or bags that compose any life in fragments and objects. The touchable and holdable things that give it meaning and tangibility.
This book is yet another artifact to be filed in the museum.
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