Old Things: Day 1

 …a time to keep and a time to cast away.

Ecclesiastes 3:6

It all began when my mother and dad left their home for assisted living, and my husband and I volunteered to be the cleaner-outers and disposer of goods after the move. Three years later, we performed the same duty at the passing of my 93-year-old aunt who had lived in the same town all her life and in the same house for over fifty years.

Experience taught us how to vote a non-emotional thumbs down on about 99.5% of the things, assigning it to either the dumpster or the local charitable donations truck. No one in the family had much interest in or room for “the good stuff,” so both times, we arrived back home with a small rental trailer containing furniture and other memory-laden keepsakes. This was all well and good because our home was large, open and had a ton of storage. Then the opportunity to move to a one-story home, smaller and closer to family, presented itself.

Through all the planning and building, the graph paper rooms full of scale-sized furniture told me beautiful lies about what I could bring with me and where it would fit. After moving in, however, I came face-to-face with a couple of realities about our new home: each room had been planned for the basics, and, unlike those motor homes whose walls can conveniently expand at the driver’s whim, it wasn’t going to get any bigger.

One piece in particular was symbolic of my plight:

For as long as I can remember, my aunt had a buffet whose sides were of two large pieces of curved glass. My aunt and uncle never had children and the piece sat on the back wall of their dining room and out of harm’s way. Even when we moved it to our former home, it found a safe spot in our over-sized entry.

When we moved it into our new breakfast room things were undeniably tight. It wasn’t hard to imagine a chair hastily pushed back from the table doing in one of those large pieces of curved glass.

For a couple of weeks, I was on a crusade to find the furniture placement that would work. But none of our other few rooms was any more hospitable to a hundred year old buffet than the breakfast room. By this time, I had conferred on the buffet, as well as several other wonderful old pieces, near-personhood. They had become the embodiment of times past and a repository of a lifetime of memories. What could I do?

What I did was pray.

Nancy Shirah