About 15 years ago my mother moved from the family home to a
small apartment. She made the change a few years after my father died. For over 35 years she lived in the
old barn-like house that 6 of my parents’ 7 children at least partially grew up
in. Of course it was not a barn,
but it resembled one so I will henceforth refer to it as the Barn House.
There was 20 years between my oldest sister, CHD, and my
youngest brother, WW. CHD was grown up when we moved into the Barn House. She only lived there for a couple of
months before she found an apartment and got on with her adult life. I must
have been about 12 when we moved in. I
was in 7th grade. There
was a lot of living that made THAT old house a home! At first there were only five children living there, because
CHD had moved out in 1965. Good Catholic that she was, my mother was soon pregnant
again and we had a sixth child living with us (the 7th sibling) in
the Barn House by 1966. In The Borg
society, I am referred to as 3 of 7.
When Mom made the decision to move, I went to Northern
Indiana to assist my siblings in paring down her belongings. The goal was to keep only the “essentials” enabling her to
fit into a one-bedroom apartment. My sweet mother is a fully realized
pack rat. She saves everything
because everything is on her “essentials” list. It was always chaos in that house, but after 35 years the
Barn House was jam-packed with memories and odd treasures. Old pictures were in every drawer, and filled
old purses and boxes tucked away in the back of her closets. Cookbooks were stuffed with additional
handwritten recipes. Her bibles,
St. Joseph Missal (Latin/English) and post Vatican II missal (English only) were
chock full of genealogical goldmines in the form of funeral cards and obituary
clippings. She saved every saint
medal, holy card, rosary, ceramic Blessed Virgin Mary statue, and wall crucifix
her kids and grandkids ever gave her.
She has 7 children and 16 grandkids so that made for a lot of Catholic
tchotchkes. I do not know how many
years worth of braided palm leaves we found. For those of you who do not know, you get palm leaves when
you go to mass on Palm Sunday. You
take them home, braid them and put them up in the house. It is a Catholic thing. I actually had one up on my bulletin
board in the NYS house. Why not? I
threw it away last February before WE moved. Actually, I regret throwing that
braided palm away. What was
I thinking?
It was fun wading through each room of my parents’ house one
last time. Of course I wanted to
help my Mom and my siblings, but I must confess my primary purpose was to
wallow in my mother’s things for the last time. I savored every drawer full of
"stuff" and every room full of junk. That "stuff" was soul deep. It was about
my past. It was about my parents’ life together. It was about
my mother’s neurosis. It was all a living testament to my mother’s strengths
and weaknesses. I wondered if our lives would change once her "stuff" was gone. Interestingly, it
was also about old time Roman Catholicism, the kind of mystical/devotional life
every Catholic was taught to observe back before Vatican II modernized the
church in the mid 1960’s. I have to stop before this post turns into my
standard rant against Vatican II changes.
It always shocks people who mistakenly presume my normal liberal views
would support saying the Mass in the vernacular. That rant will have to wait for another post.
Unlike my more pragmatic siblings, I could not fault her
when I found stacks of old church calendars in a corner of the kitchen. These are calendars that each parish
church gives out free to parishioners every year. The pictures of saints, the
BVM, and her illustrious son were reason enough to keep them. They were
beautiful. There are many things
one might fault the Roman Catholics for, but their art is not one of them. For crying out loud, wouldn’t it be a
venial sin to throw out things like that anyway? OK, I threw them away when she was not looking, but still –
I was so happy to get my grubby little hands on them for a few minutes. I stood
firm in defending this collection, although I did kind of wonder why the pile
was stacked on top of chocolate covered cherry boxes filled with old recipes and
newspaper clippings that were stored underneath a chair pushed in a corner of
the kitchen. But then again, the
opposite corner held a cart filled with old newspapers and magazines. Maybe it was about balance, or a feng shui decision meant to increase the
flow of favorable energy in the room?
I am willing to give the old lady the benefit of the doubt. I love her madly and I find her
quirkiness endearing.
Believe it or
not, I found a handwritten Pillsbury Flour Contest recipe submission that my
maternal grandmother (who died before I was born…) submitted in the 1940s. It was lying between two magazines in a
pile of many. I wish I knew how it
got there. If I had just picked up
the entire pile of magazines and dumped them in the trash this recipe would
have been lost forever. Talk about
treasure! I probably slowed
everyone down because I insisted on looking at every knickknack and perusing old
recipes to my heart’s content. I
did not care, though. On that day I imagined myself an
archaeologist of sorts, and I am nothing if not self-indulgent. It made the old lady happy, too. She was thrilled that I valued her
stuff. I was having fun and I
might even have been her favorite child for a few fleeting moments there. When you are 3 of 7 you appreciate those
fleeting moments.
I took pictures of rooms and furniture and piles of
junk. My younger siblings thought
I was nuts. They seemingly had no
nostalgic feelings about the Barn House.
They just wanted to throw everything away so the house could be cleaned
out, cleaned up and sold. I
was shocked and disturbed. Why
wasn’t I practical and focused?
Could it be that I am like my mother? Oh, HELL no!
The best part was when three of us went through the linen
closet with my Mom present. She
had a huge upstairs hallway closet with lacquered wooden doors that opened up
like French doors. This linen
closet was wide enough that all four of us could stand and sort through the
shelves at the same time. We found
many linens, very few of them useable.
There were old tablecloths with holes in or stains on them, sheets so
threadbare you could see through them, and old towels and doilies that were
tattered and torn. Unfortunately,
our sweet mother did not see them in the same way we did. These things held different meanings for
her. She became agitated and
defensive, not wanting to throw anything away. Her standard response if we posed the question “Can we throw
this away?” was “No, it is still good, someone could use that.” She displayed classic Depression Era post-traumatic stress syndrome with subsequent hording behavior. It was amazing to observe at close hand. Her eyes were wild. She positioned herself behind us so she could see exactly what each one of us was doing. She pulled things off the trash pile if we tried to sneak them there without asking her first.
We made four piles on the floor: the
trash pile, the Goodwill pile, the give-to-a-family-member pile, and the
keep-for-the-new-apartment pile. I
think you can imagine how much went on the trash pile.
After 15 minutes our sweet mother could
no longer stand the sight of us.
We took a break. We three
siblings conspired when Mom went to the bathroom (do not get me started on her
bathroom…). We decided to reassure her by putting the unusable things she could
not bear to throw away on the Goodwill pile and then throw things away when we
took them away from her house. We
also agreed to “take” many things she wanted to pass on to family that in
reality no family member would possibly want, and to quietly dispose of them
accordingly. Sorting into piles became
easier for all of us. She was
happy, we were happy, and the job got done.
I came home from that visit with many amazing
treasures: An aluminum potato ricer I have absolutely no memory of,
the tin French fry slicer that had intrigued me my entire childhood even though I do not make French fries, a heavy
metal meat grinder I will almost certainly never use, the no-tech haircutting tools my grandmother used to cut our hair
as children (giving us Mamie Eisenhower bangs in the 1950s). I foolishly brought home two boxes filled
with the inexpensive Currier and Ives-style china that my Mom had painstakingly
purchased piece by piece at the grocery store. I did
not want them, but it made her so happy when I said I would take them. I also had Mom’s old Singer sewing
machine even though both my daughter and I already had new machines. I took many funeral cards and all
the Blessed Virgin Mary statues that I ever bought her, despite the fact that I have not been a Roman Catholic since 1968. It made me happy to take these things, but I found it made me sad to have it all. I am happy T and I were able to get
rid of so much “stuff” this past year in anticipation of our move to Florida. That is when I finally gave the potato
ricer, the china, and the old sewing machine to the Salvation Army. They were still good. I am sure someone is using
them.
