Post Apocalyptic House

When my mom came to visit me in Seattle, her hometown, we would occasionally drive past the house where she grew up.  It never looked the same to her.  Although it is nice, it was not as great as she remembered. Her dad was a florist and had traffic-stopping flower beds.  Personally, I don’t think the magnificence of his flower beds really had anything to do with the fact he was a florist.  It had more to do with the fact that he lived in a small house with four daughters and a wife.

He needed to escape the drama and hours of them practicing scales on the piano.  So he fled to the garden.  My mom remembers their garden gazebo often smelled of cigar smoke.  Some men have their man caves in the basement with TVs and beer.  Her dad sat in a gazebo surrounded by little girls’ tea sets and forgotten dollies.

But he didn’t neglect what was inside the house.  The family was a close knit one.  I have pictures of the inside of her house and recognize the furniture as the very chairs I sat on growing up and the paintings I looked at my whole life.  Here I thought they were antiques.  In reality?  Hand-me-downs from my grandmother.  But basically, isn’t that what antiques are?  Hand-me-downs bestowed and lovingly kept?

My mom, being the only one left from her family and my dad’s family, has piles of inherited stuff.  All of it cherished because it belonged to people she loved.  I can imagine manor houses in England are stuffed to the rafters with treasures.  But even manor houses get full.  How do they handle all those years of accumulation?  How do you pitch the slightly worn Victorian chair your mom sat in every night?  What do you do with your dad’s lovingly preserved Boy Scout uniform?  The medals from World War II?  What do you do with HIS father’s drafting tools?

Sell them? When my aunt and uncle passed away, my cousins faced this dilemma.  One cousin lives across the country, the other travels a lot, so neither of them could keep the collections of silver boxes, art, or paintings from Europe.  They were sold for pennies on the dollar.

Between sentimentality and economy, my brothers and I have kept everything from a generation raised in the Depression who never threw anything out.

This past year, Mom’s had to move out of her house and into assisted living, and now faces moving to skilled nursing. Yesterday my husband and I came down to visit, and are staying in her abandoned house.  It’s as if she just went out shopping months ago and never came back.

Very post-apocalyptic here.  There are quiet rooms where people used to live, books with bookmarks still in them.  Photo albums, beds they slept in, half-used hand lotion.  Spiders are in the pantry, dead flies in the shower.  An overturned walker lies in the den.

The collections of items that have been loved for generations are adrift in a forgotten sea.  Memories call like mournful foghorns.  Christmas parties, four weddings and receptions, and black tie dinner parties for 50 people were all held here.  Piercing fragments of the past stab me in every room.  My dad cooking breakfast on Saturday morning, my mom cutting roses.  Dogs, babies, college students---gone.  All that is left is spider webs and empty chairs.

But there are torch bearers.  Lighthouses.  A voice calling through the fog. 

Visiting my mom today, I showed her some pictures of my grandchildren and told her of our plans for the future.  She wanted to be included in them.  She wanted to go up to Washington once more, wanted to see our new cabin when it was built.  Her face lit up when I told her about it.  I held her rope-veined hand, the tissue paper skin cool in mine. 

You can count on me Mom.  You will be included.  In all the future Thanksgivings, when I’m making the stuffing with your special recipe.  In all the future Christmases when I’m tying the bow just like you did.  All the future times when I’m singing your favorite hymns to my grandchildren. Whenever I'm kind, or gracious, or loving.

You’ll be there.  Forever.