Possessions

Ron and I are in the times of our lives when we’re beginning to lighten our load. Those things we thought we could never stand to part with are no longer important. If our kids don’t want one of these treasures, we donate it. It doesn’t even hurt – very much.

As I sift through my lifetime of objects, I’m reminded of my grandmother, and the things she chose to keep, because, other than a couple of items that have found their ways back, I will never know what she discarded, or why. I’ve never seen that pile, and despite my curiosity about it, I never will. It is lost to time, and the memories of those long gone. I am familiar only with the pile of “saves”, and in the thoughtlessness of childhood, I never asked her why she made the choices she did.

Among the “saves”, and I have it, is my grandfather’s childhood quilt, made from the dark fabrics of the 1860s. Many of the squares are eaten away, exposing the batting underneath, dinners for decades-gone moths and silverfish. The quilts of today would scoff at this frontier relic, but to me it struts proudly into the modern era of plenty, resplendent in its frugality and tiny stitches of love. So this Momo kept and lugged from place to increasingly-smaller place.

She had a leather valise in her room when she lived with us, and had I not been such a foolish child I would have had her tell me about everything in it. One day she showed me a small box containing my grandfather’s belt, pipe, tobacco pouch, and a 1909 diary/logbook he kept when he was snowbound in Cripple Creek. These went to my brother.

The most puzzling of all , though, was the jumble of black and white photographs into which the small box was laid. None were identified, and hence now lost. They were not categorized by decade or personage. With them was the camera with which Momo recorded those times. My brother has that, too.

She did not keep the ship’s clock that my grandfather brought into their union – I have it now because my mother found it in the garbage heap behind the Mayer house in 1939 and rescued it. It was the kitchen clock of my childhood, and in a strange twist of events it is now my kitchen clock.

As I separate my stuff into “keep” and “don’t keep”, besides asking myself if I want to store it, I also ask if my grandchildren might like it someday.

Maybe that’s why Momo kept what she kept. For me.