I like my past. It’s alive and it’s not boring. It’s a keeper. Which is why I’ve become, cheerfully, one of those little old ladies with a houseful of stuff.
(Yes, I’m little, five-foot-two, going on five-foot-one. And I’m old, eighty-three, coming up on eighty-four. And a lady? Sure, why not?)
Like a lot of people I know, and as I’ve mentioned before, I am getting rid of stuff. I’m culling. I’m tidying up. An artist friend who owns a lot of gorgeous, arty stuff calls it deaccessioning.
I’m culling because, although my intention is to live to 100, I could, in fact, disappear from the planet the day after tomorrow.
Just in Case I Die
And so, I can’t help noticing, from one corner of my brain, that there is a heck of a lot of stuff kicking around in my biggish house, which my children will have to deal with if ever I should happen to die.
Some of my stuff is easy enough for me to shed. The travel hair dryer I found languishing in a bottom drawer of the bathroom vanity. Books I didn’t want to read then and don’t want to read now. Three handmade icons acquired in Greece that were supposed to feel holy, but don’t.
But so many of my things are keepers. They are tangible, feelable links to my past — to people in my past. The milk pitcher from France, shaped like a cow, that belonged to my mother. The umbrella with polka dots Jon gave me for a birthday. The blanket he found in a tourist shop with a map showing Michigan and the town where I spent my childhood summers.
The Person Is Gone, the Gesture Lives On
These things, these keepers, are not souvenirs. They are not mementos of my mother or my husband. They are not things. They are gestures, gestures that continue the original act of giving.
These things were given as gifts while my mother and husband were still alive, and they give to me now. When I wrap myself in my husband’s Michigan blanket, I feel the blanket. I also feel the gesture, my husband’s impulse to do something nice for me.
In other words, the people who are supposedly dead live on here around me in a house filled with gestures.
A Homely Lump
I go from room to room in my house and I feel gestures everywhere, still vibrant, coming back at me.
- The drawing Peter made for me in second grade, “because you slept in my room when I was scared.”
- The homely lump of play-dough little Christina once gave me. It was my “cool,” she explained. I had been saying, “I’m losing my cool,” a lot lately, and Christina had noticed. I could keep this cool and never lose it.
Little Peter and little Christina are long gone, replaced by full-grown adults. But my children, as children, are still alive in these long-ago, still present, gestures.
I used to wonder, along with a lot of people, at the little old ladies who refused to leave their homes long after their houses had become too big, too impractical and often too unsafe for them to stay in. Such women were living in the past, it seemed. Why didn’t they just move on?
I Like My Past. It’s a Keeper
What the youthful me did not understand was how rich my life would become as I turned into one of those little old ladies.
Decades have piled upon decades for me. Family, jobs, friends — one following after the other, from Michigan to Germany to New York to San Francisco. Dorm rooms, apartments, houses. An umbrella tree plant in an apartment window, azaleas and a bower vine in a front yard garden.
Brides and Little Old Ladies
As a young bride I lived in the future. I shopped for bedsheets and crystal wine glasses for my anticipated life to come.
We are instructed — we brides and we little old ladies — by the wise ones among us to live in the present. Let the future and the past take care of themselves.
The truth is, the present is pretty boring. It’s populated with the ATT guy who’s come to fix the wonky TV and takes three hours doing it. It’s the notice arriving in the mail that your driver’s license is expiring and it’s time to get in line at the DMV.
There’s much more fun to be had in taking a time out from the present and accepting a gesture from the past. My mother giving me her French cow. Jon presenting me with polka dots. Peter making a drawing of his house. Christina steadying me with her cool.
More about losing my mother at “Found: Big Bucks in My Sock Drawer. Lost: My Mother.” More about getting older at “My Brand-New White Hair. It’s Real. It’s Scary. But I Kinda Like It.”
