THE THINGS SHE KEPT

We had a whirlwind of a visit to see our family in California for the last week of the year.  It was one day after another of familiar faces that we hadn’t seen in a full twelve months, with a wedding squeezed into the middle of it all.  The rubber band of time got stretched very thin and tight, and so much happened that I feel I’ve returned home from a round-the-world tour.  Even so, our house acts as though we never left.

The part of our trip that I brought home with me – literally – was the two days of sorting through my grandparents’ house, which they built themselves and lived in together for forty years.  When Grandma died last year she left behind the home she’d worked so hard on, the garden that she’d tended relentlessly, a family who carries on some of her firmly held opinions about the way things ought to go – but she also left a lot of things.  We knew her as a practical, no-nonsense organizer who ran a tight ship and operated mostly on a no-frills, no-clutter policy.  But for all that, she’d amassed a sizable collection of trinkets and other objects in her lifetime.

She collected beautiful things.  Grandma liked what was simple and well-made: clothes, dishes and furniture alike.  As my aunt said to me, laughing, Grandma was “green” long before the word was repurposed.  She used her dryer as a storage place for shopping bags, which she reused frequently, and hung all her laundry out to dry near what used to be a chicken coop.  If she could do it herself, she usually did.  She did all the contracting when her house was built. 

I would always have described Grandma as straightforward – she would give her opinion whether you needed it or not – but there were unexpected discoveries as we sifted through her belongings: exactly how many glass goblets she’d collected, how many old photographs had been squirreled away, and how few of her own mother’s collected treasures she had discarded.  Maybe that was the real surprise: how much of the stuff wasn’t hers.

It was a course in the similarities and differences between mother and daughter.  One had kept boxes of jewelry; the other had boxes of heavy-weight paper.  Many of my great-grandmother’s dresses were still hanging in the closet, and in a way it was surprising that Grandma had never moved them.  She seemed like the sort to have cleaned all of it out long ago.  We would never have called her sentimental, but maybe we underestimated her on that count.  We would never have expected her to leave so much behind, but there we were, up to our knees in things she had saved.

Of the things of Grandma’s that I chose to keep, I brought home as much as I could carry and what I trusted wouldn’t be destroyed by a jostling journey in our luggage.  Some of it belonged to Grandma, some of it to her mother.  I have quilts, picture frames, a small ceramic pitcher, a pile of old dresses, a vest she made for herself whose holes I plan to sew up.  I didn’t bring any of it back for the memories, because I know without a doubt that I’ll remember her.  I brought these things back because I can use them.  They were useful to Grandma in her house, and they will be useful to me, and I will have the same joy in using them that she did.

It seems right to be practical in memory of the woman who lay in her bed, knowing full well how little time she had left on this earth, and said to me, “We need to replace the roof on the house.”