Today as I was driving around my home town, I noticed a straggly little patch of spider lillies growing under a tree in someone's front yard, and I was immediately transported back to my childhood, vivd memories of waiting for the school bus on cool autumn mornings, with a fistful of fresh picked spider lillies wrapped in a damp paper towel as a gift for my third grade teacher. I can smell the crisp, clear morning air, and feel the cool dampness in my hand. I can clearly picture mama standing in the front door, watching to make sure I safely boarded the bus. Sometimes I'm just awe struck by how even the simplest, most mundane sights, sounds, and smells, can trigger some obscure, or long forgotten memory, from the deepest confines of the subconscious.
Now that I've decided to sell my house, I'm dealing with the issue of decluttering 37 years worth of family life in this house. Cleaning out sheds, closets, and the attic has produced an abundance of memory triggers, more than I'm truly able to process at one time. Books, bicycles, and boxes of Barbie accoutrement, stirs up flash backs to hours spent playing Barbies and fighting over who's doll got to wear what with a cousin, or the girl next door, racing down the street on my new three speed I got for Christmas, and curling up next to mama, as she read Grimm's Fairy Tales to us. All those memories, all the material things that bring them to mind, and give them life, are they truly connected? Can a tagible object actually contain one's memories? Can you have one without the other?
Looking back at the last 45 years of my life, and as I begin the process of closing that chapter of my life, I can honestly, and clearly answer those questions. Beyond all shadows of doubt, I realize now that material items, things, possesions, do not bear the burden of our memories, nor store them for us until we want them to pop out, like a jack in the box. So many friends and family members have asked me why I've given away so many things that were once prized possessions, how can I so easily part with my memories? Some of those things may very well be worth something, and have great monetary value. If they do, then I wish the new owner nothing but good will, and perhaps when they are enjoying whatever it is I gave them, or the rewards gained from selling it, they will remember me, and I too will be a fond memory.
No matter the value, or monetary worth a piece of furniture, china, or old junk might hold, just like the spider lillies that pop up each September, they too can be plucked up, and later discarded when their beauty fades, and the charm wears off. True enough there are some things that I can never part with, Moe's wedding band, my mother's engagement ring that Moe had re-designed for me, and his Ibanez guitar. I'll keep those things with me until I leave this earth, but even though I'll treasure them always, I can't take them with me when I die, and the memories they evoke are as much a part of me in the here and now, as breathing in and out. The rest of the stuff in this house... it's all just a spider lillies,
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