The quick sale of my parents’ house means that 61 years of stuff spanning the last half of the 20th century and the opening years of the 21st has had to be cleaned out in 3 months.
The vanishing of my mother makes the loss of the house that much more painful; my attempts to hold on reflected in how much stuff I’ve asked to be delivered to me, as the movers I’ve overpaid will do today.
I know that objects never entirely satisfy, that imbuing them with power is superstitious, even idolatrous, yet I stubbornly cling to my mother’s things, the things she loved and touched and used: The lamp by which she read. The vases in which she placed roses and lilacs from her small garden —now abandoned and dotted with splayed bushes, scattered and sad as makeshift graves. The paintings from the front hall and living room, backdrops to so much life lived in these spaces as well as the photos that captured it: well-fed doctors and their tipsy wives, shoulder straps askew, beaming at the camera after one-too-many on New Years, relatives looking gorged and complacent on Thanksgiving, my brother, younger sister and me wrestling so wildly, so you can almost smell our flushed aggression.
Where will I put these things? Right now it doesn’t matter. All I want to do is see them and touch them and smell them so that the spirit of my mother, who loved them might be with me a bit longer.