 |
After my mom left this world more than six years ago, my oldest aunt continued living in her house. And since my aunt respectfully kept my mom’s old bedroom – as well as about the entire place – exactly the way my mom left it, we didn’t have a need to go through all of mom’s things right away.
Until last week.
My aunt joined mom on the other side last year, and we finally got around to doing what needed to be done. My mom was a notorious pack rat, with 67 years worth of memories still encased on everything from her mom’s old furniture to pieces of paper taped to her desk, and my aunt was worse considering her addiction to keeping old magazines and movies handy – just in case.
So it’s safe to say we were easily able to part with some things, like TV Guides from the 1990s, a VHS tape of the 2004 Latin Grammy Awards and that weird thing in the corner that nobody could remember where it came from. Others were a bit more heart-wrenching.
Two photos had hung in my mom’s bedroom in every one of the dozens of places she lived in. One was of toddler me smiling big while wearing a Bob Jones shirt, the definitive image of my childhood; the other was of my toddler sister looking particularly adorable, wearing a dress for one of the few times in her life.
It hurt my soul to take those photos out of the frames they had happily resided in for 50 years. It’s my task to make sure they’re still around in another half-century for my great-grandchildren to make fun of after we’re gone.
Pouring through mom’s files – and more files hidden within those files, plus Post-It notes thrown in for good measure – was painstaking because we didn’t want to take a chance on missing something important that would be lost forever in family history. And important things they were, like receipts from hotel stays in the 1980s, instructions for a toaster bought in 1998, a utilities bill from 2007, a closet filled with bubble wrap and empty packages from nearly everything Amazon had ever sent.
The fun never ends!
Then there were the Mother’s Day and birthday cards carefully preserved for years in boxes under the stairs. The personal letters saved. The things she kept because they were gifts. Recipes passed on for generations. Photos of family, friends and people I can’t even remember, but they still make me laugh like a little kid being pushed on a swing and banging into the person doing the pushing.
The fun never ends – and this time I really mean it.
We did end up with a Penske truckload for the landfill, which was all-morning adventure all of its own. (Did you know that the Lauderdale County, Ala., landfill won’t take trash from Florence, Ala., even though that city’s residents do, in fact, pay county taxes? Of course you didn’t, and I’m sure it made sense to some government bureaucrat angling for a bigger piece of the tax revenue pie, but for the love of God, we were just trying to do the right thing here and not leave it by the road for sanitation workers to collect.)
We also ended up with a local nonprofit coming by and taking a truckload of furniture and whatnot – or at least what was left after a partially disabled but hard-working guy and his wife stopped by and cherry-picked through what was on the lawn at the time. I’m fascinated by how interested folks get when they see things being brought outside.
However, we brought home much more. Sure, we found several things to keep because someone needed it, for sentimental reasons or being that it was a vinyl record, but we also spent a few days just being immersed in all things mom again. She was with us on every wall, around every corner, in the back of the closet – even in every dustball. (And we coughed across way too many of those.)
I could almost hear mom’s booming voice again, asking someone to let the dogs out, wondering who wants what for dinner or yelling at my aunt to quit telling the story wrong. Even though we were getting rid of many things she owned, she felt just as alive as ever.
David Brown is publisher of the Cherokee Scout. You can reach him by phone, 837-5122; email, dbrown@cherokeescout.com; or on Twitter @daviddBstroh.