The Things We Keep
July 6, 2013
Hello, all!It's been quite a while. I've been totally preoccupied with my new book, "What There Was Not To Tell," which is currently at the printer and which will be going on sale very soon! Stay tuned. It will be available very soon. In the meantime, I hope you will enjoy this essay. Happy Fourth!!!
The Things We Keep
Last year, I accomplished something I didn’t think possible: I cleaned out my barn. Rolling open the big doors revealed a great hodgepodge of objects from the past, files from stories I have written over the years, family papers, and things I think I might need or might fix someday. Lacking a compelling reason, one can let all this lie, like the sleeping dog. However, there was a party coming up and the barn had to be used. I kept putting off the great purge until one soft, warm June morning, I put on an old sweatshirt, rugged shoes, and gloves and rolled open those forbidding doors. I had asked John, who had done some good work for me in the past, to help in this process. He actually looked delighted.
I began with the boxes filled with papers. I sat on a milk crate in the light of the barn’s one south window, sunlight illuminating the pages before me. Each box sent me into reverie. So many other times, so many other places. Could I really have lived this long? As I opened the cartons at random, it was like watching my life pass before me. Photos of my parents holding my little hand at the beach. Photos of me and my college roommates lounging in our eclectically furnished, flower-child dorm room. Letters from old boyfriends. I found diplomas with the corners chewed by mice. Why do I need these at this point in my life? Photos of me and my first husband building our first house. A filed marked “divorce papers.” I didn’t think I still had them. Boxes and boxes of files from stories I have written over the years. Spiral notebooks filled with notes, phone numbers, names now forgotten. Trunks of old clothes. I sorted and sorted.
This wasn’t so much a physical task, though it required some muscle, but instead, a work of the heart. To be kept was the three-piece bobsled, who knows how old, which my father cleaned up and painted red and gave to me the year I moved to New Hampshire; my grandfather’s surfboard, procured on a trip to Hawaii in the 1930s; and the Singer treadle sewing machine in good running condition (always living with one eye on the apocalypse). But then there were those pink monogrammed towels my mother bought for me, which I never used. The sweater my long-gone grandmother knit for me but which never fit. This kind of gift causes paralysis in me. I can’t give it away or send it to the rummage, or heavens, throw it away. Something in me won’t allow that. And so it all piles up, things I don’t want or need but things that, nevertheless, carry with them a deep well of emotion. Perhaps what I’m trying to keep is the memory of the love and generosity these people brought me when they were alive.
It seemed an impossible task. But not for John. “What are you going to do with this?” he would ask, holding up some clearly dilapidated item. I began to see through his eyes.
There was a lot of carnage and many trips to the dumps or to the church rummage but in the end, I saw the walls and floor of the barn for the first time since I’ve lived here. At the end, John looked around and asked me, “So what are you going to do with this now?” he asked, as if we had actually created something new. I’m sure he didn’t want to hear my answer which was, “Probably start filling it up again.”