What We Leave Behind
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| New Orleans Antique Shop, 2016 |
What We Leave Behind
It’s a dream I have again and again. My grandmother’s red wooden house with the tire swing outside. A swing that was, incidentally, always full of wasps. Inside the dream, there are rooms that unfold into other rooms that never existed. Full of shadeless lamps and boxes of photographs covered in dust. Thick curtains that are creased from folding. A black lacquer box filled with nail polishes and tiny white sample lipsticks, all in my grandmother’s favorite 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 midcentury atomic-style 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. Overwhelmed by objects. By the weight and volume of them. Smiling faces of strangers and family alike across decades and several states. They felt heavy inside, like a bag of rocks I would carry for the rest of my life.
*
In addition to the encyclopedias my mother eventually threw out decades later, I inherited a small gold jewelry box, lined in red velvet with a cameo lid adorned with a dancing couple. Also, an orange and brown flowered sofa that sat in our basement for years. In college, still living with my parents, I hauled it up the stairs to my room for some extra seating. Years later, I moved it into an apartment with glorious floors and a sleeping porch. Months later, I had to abandon it when I broke my lease and moved out rather stealthily under the cover of night. I left the sofa, though I had once harvested one of my grandmother’s single pearl clip-on earring from its cushions. This I kept.
From my paternal grandmother who dies when I was six, I inherited several sets of vintage salt & pepper shakes shaped like saint bernards and siamese cats. Trophies from their years of breeding show dogs. A small porcelain jewelry box with cherry blossoms. The box, I have broken and glued it back together after multiple mishaps. Most importantly, a small red diary with a kitten. Inside, 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. Her years alone were closest to how I once imagined I wanted my own life to look.
*
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 possess 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. My favorite vintage objects belonged to other people’s lives. The dead grandmothers of strangers.
*
When my mother passed away after a long and troublesome bout with both heart complications, injuries, 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 cap of the aisle and commented how sad it was to see someone’s prized collection of what-its and thingamabobs. Porcelain cats, salt and pepper shakers, novelty cookie jars. Their sheer number meant someone had, at best, unloaded them when cleaning out a home. Or, someone who had inherited them from a dead loved one and didn’t quite know what to do with them.
And now they were here, gathering dust and being fondled speculatively by shoppers. Removed of their history. Of their context.
When my father followed my mother five years later, we cleaned out the house still stuffed with bits of snowmen and sports memorabilia. While he had cleared out her clothing and jewelry fairly early on, he left his own legacy along with bits and pieces of 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 at some point. The rest was carted home by my sister or hauled away by dumpsters.
*
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 essay is yet another artifact to be filed in the museum.
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