Getting rid of stuff in the house where I grew up was a funny thing. We were four women, three generations, living in a largeish house with ample storage space, but there was never enough room for stuff. We were always needing to make more room for new stuff.
Of stuff, there was ‘your stuff’, ‘my stuff’ and some loosely communal stuff, which often had a known owner but was always in circulation. Jewelry was communal stuff, Barbie clothes (though not Barbies) were communal stuff, and some items of clothing were communal too, like certain sweaters, LL Bean hunting boots and a ski jacket which still bore the remnant of a pink 1965 Sun Valley lift ticket on its left hood string and was only ever worn for going outside to feed the dog.
My grandmother was well-known (and feared) for throwing away other people’s stuff to make room for her stuff. (From my stuff two things went missing which I still mourn: a friend’s great-grandfather’s WW1 pilot’s jacket—which had a hideous hole in the elbow but was still beautiful and, more to the point, not mine to throw away—and a photocopied lyric sheet from a 10,000 Maniacs album which had been drawn on and autographed by Natalie Merchant herself.)
The rest of us had a few choices: you could give your stuff away, throw it away, or foist it on someone else in the house, and if you were me, usually it was the latter. This meant it was no longer my stuff but it was still close by, and yet I had room for more more stuff. Brilliant!
Books, too, were communal, more or less. They sort of belonged to the house, which had large built-in-shelves covering a living room wall. A lot of the books had come with the house, like classics, old textbooks, and oddities including a whole set of World Books from the 1950s, beautifully typeset in Futura and woefully outdated (though this did not stop my sister or me from referencing them for school reports and probably explains a lot about my teenage worldview).
We were all good readers and the house library did get used. Like a lot of people, my grandmother became a compulsive reader of mysteries and crime novels, and she also would re-read a favourite classic from time to time. These would often be bookmarked with Kleenex, or with an old, folded magazine subscription blow-in card (one of those mailback postcards that snow out of an American magazine the minute you pick it up).
On my last visit home, in 2005 for Gram’s memorial service, I spent two weeks in the house with my mom and my daughter (still three generations, just one woman down, since my sister was living in the UK and was too pregnant to travel). I enjoyed this time at my home in its everyday state, knowing it would be the last time I could be home. I enjoyed walking around outside, visiting with some high school friends, seeing lots of cousins, and I spent a lot of time sorting out ‘my stuff’, which had dwindled over the years, subject to my periodic culling as well as my grandmother’s and later my mother’s.
I wanted to take the whole house back to Australia with me, just fold it down like closing a pop-up book, and take it all away with me, because it contained so much of my memory in it—stuff I’m foisting on you now—but in the end I had to be realistic.
I recognised my useless stuff for what it was and threw it out. The things I could not bear to chuck out (a couple of LPs, Barbie clothes which were communal and could not legally travel home with me, some books) I foisted on my mother. And I had collected new stuff which I needed to make room for in my suitcase: a small stuffed animal for my daughter, a marble game for my son, two duck prints for my husband—note none of them seems to particularly like or appreciate these things but oh well—plus a large teapot, a copper jelly mould, four pretty rice bowls, a little Portuguese cream jug, and a book for me.
The book was a funny thing. The Importance of Living, by Lin Yutang (fourteenth printing, 1938), was tucked onto (another) bookshelf in the den, where my grandmother’s stuff had piled up due to the time she spent there watching TV, reading, napping, having meals—so although it wasn’t something I would have expected her to read, I I knew she must have been reading it (and the subscription-card bookmark inside was a giveaway). But the endpaper bears a sticker with my great-grandmother’s name and address in it so I don’t know who was pencilling lines under certain passages and folding down the odd page.
I picked the book up again recently (admittedly to use as a prop in a photo shoot) and in flicking through it and noting the particular marked phrases, realised again that I have a treasure on my hands here. The book itself, and also, the book as a window into the minds of two women who’ve shaped me just by virtue of being alive, passing along their thoughts, their ways of doing things, handing them along through generations (for better or for worse). Here’s a bit that helps explain what I mean, and why I might want to blog about it anyway:
“There is a method of appealing to one’s own intuitive judgment, of thinking out one’s own ideas and forming one’s own independent judgments, and confessing them in public with a childish impudence, and sure enough, some kindred souls in another corner of the world will agree with you. A person forming his ideas in this manner will often be astounded to discover how another writer said exactly the same things and felt exactly the same way, but perhaps expressed the ideas more easily and more gracefully. It is then that he discovers the ancient author and the ancient author bears him witness, and they become forever friends in spirit.”
Good stuff. Stuff to keep.
I finished meetings on Tuesday, thus ending my knitting time. I finished one spiral boot sock and got halfway through the second. Would that all meetings were so productive.
