a day makes. Especially when that day
is accompanied by five strong men wielding weed whackers and chainsaws.
And
driving a large empty truck into which they throw all the accumulated trash of
three years of caretakers never throwing anything away.
 |
| and this was after they cleaned |
I admit I accumulated a
number of bits and pieces in the 15 years I lived in the cabin. This comes from
living so long on the island, and never knowing what you might have a use for.
But I like to think I’d learned what I would never have a use for and been able
to throw it away.
I know it’s hard to get rid of things. As I watched the men
clear out the basement I kept thinking, “I should keep that. We might need that
at the little cabin. Maybe we could use that at the house.”
And then I remembered a house I’d helped clear out on the
island after a death, and how along with the piles and piles and boxes of
things that could be made use of there was twice as much that was just simply
trash. I thought of the Allen House basements, and how when I cleaned out
the Annex in 1982 I found, along with decades old dried up paint cans and bits
of wood zinc screws and washers, parts from WWII when zinc was the only
material available for civilian hardware.
And I thought of my mother’s house, when we three girls got
together to go through it after my mother was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s and
went to live in an assisted care living center. I wasn’t even there for most of
it. Although I'd not yet been diagnosed with EDS, it was obvious my body had hit its limit.I was sent back, exhausted, to Virginia after the first two days and my
sisters finished the cleanup.
But I was there long
enough. Long enough to unearth tax returns from 30 years before, boxes and
boxes of papers that turned out to be versions of the same two short stories
she worked on for those same 30 years. Newspapers and magazines and torn out
articles. My mother had no problem getting rid of most “things.” She had a
garage full of things for my grandmother’s house, but there were no boxes and
boxes of her books or china or silver
or records or souvenirs. She needed little, and bought less.
What my mother collected was paper. Or rather, words and
pictures on paper. I hadn’t really thought about it until just this moment.
This piece started out to be about things, the things we thought we needed,
couldn’t live without, and it when they disappeared we almost never noticed
they were gone.
My mother collected words and pictures. She collected
stories. Sometimes they were the stories the words actually wrote, and the
pictures actually meant. Often her own stories had little to do with facts, and
I’m not sure if she collected these factual stories because of, or in spite of
this.
She’d always collected words, although her life after she
moved to that little house on the east side of Providence belonged less to
books and more to magazines and newspapers, less to short stories and more to
the journal she wrote in daily.
I wonder when my mother became aware that she was losing
stories. My mother has always been a consummate actress,and this makes me wonder how many
years she starred in this play of her own making before the role itself became
too much to remember, the directions too confusing. I wonder if it started
years before our family noticed anything wrong.
And I wonder if that was when my mother began to collect words
and stories in such quantities? She had always mailed us bits and pieces,
torn out articles she felt we’d find interesting. Did it come naturally to
her to just start keeping all the stories for herself?
Maybe the piles and stacks of papers hidden in my mother’s closets and drawers were her attempt to hold onto a life she only imagined she really had.
Maybe some people keep all the things because they feel life itself slipping away from them. Maybe they, too, feel
out of control, and holding onto stuff helps.
And there's probably a reason I end up, time and time again, working my way through collections someone else has deemed important enough to hold on to.
There are things we cannot know.
