I just finished reading this quirky little book called The Gentle Art of Swedish Death Cleaning and I find that I am not yet ready for that level of de-cluttering. I can certainly get rid of things we haven't touched in years (but I have to get Jon to agree, and that is not so simple) but the author advises that you go through the things that you are sentimentally attached to, relive your memories, and then divest. I can't do that yet.
While I fully admit that we have way too much stuff and we should continue to decrease the level of duplication and hoarding (I do love notebooks and paper), I am planning on reliving memories for a while and I like some of these props. What I should be doing is thinking about who might want them next, and get people on board to take some of this stuff.
The object that arrived most recently -- my grandfather's clock -- makes me smile every day. For all the years until I went away to college, our grandparents provided a stable, welcoming second home for the four grandchildren who lived within walking distance.
Our own home was welcoming too, but it was chaotic. Housekeeping was not a priority in our childhood, although the dishes always got washed and there were daily chores that made it possible for everyone to function. Clearing the kitchen table was such a big job every single day. That table had a lot of jobs, from money counting to chainsaw sharpening to homework to food preparation to family dinner.
At our grandparents' house, everything always seemed to be in order and exactly the same. Grandpa was gruff and didn't spend a lot of time talking to his grandchildren but we knew he liked us. He was hampered by having no vocal cords or something (a result of an early cancer), so he had to speak in a gravelly whisper. If you didn't know him, that might be hard to take. But I don't think we thought twice about it, as kids. Grandma was the one who provided snacks, smiles, conversation, discipline, sample reading tests for entertainment, trips to High's for ice cream cones. She was the warm fuzzy one. She definitely liked us.
By the time we knew it, the house had additions built on to its original few rooms. As I think about it, it seems likely that the living room, dining room and bedrooms above them might have been the first house. Those parts were certainly constructed out of the oldest materials -- horsehair plaster, wide floorboards in the dining room, and the bedrooms upstairs were tucked under the slanting metal roof. There were wings added on over the 150 years or so -- one for the kitchen and one for more bedrooms. (Outside there were decaying auxiliary buildings: a smokehouse, chicken house, granary, barn.) My grandmother had tucked bathrooms into every nook and cranny of the additions, upstairs and downstairs. So it was a house with odd steps down, every time you went into a different section. I never remember wondering about that at all, but now that I think about it, I don't know other houses with so many little steps.
So when you walked into the front door, there was an entryway. To the left there was s step down to the living room. The living room floor was painted plywood with an oval rag rug connecting the furniture that faced the middle of the room: two easy chairs, two lamps facing a couch with a coffee table in the center of the space. Around the perimeter were bookshelves full of books. There was a fireplace with a mantelpiece, and on that shelf sat our grandfather's clock.
It is an eight day clock, built a long time ago. When I was old enough to be trusted, my grandfather taught me to wind it. Exactly how many turns, how not to go too far, and to do it at exactly the same time each week. When they were out of town, it was my job to wind the clock. In those days, it rang on the hour. Nowadays it doesn't seem to ring, but we know it can because our friend the clock-fixer had it ringing at his house. When we got it back home, it was all discombobulated from lying down in the back seat of the car for a week and it is still trying to regain its composure. It has to be perfectly balanced. Jon is still making adjustments.
Behind the easy chairs, up on the wall there were two portraits. One of my father when he was about 8 years old and one of my aunt when she was about 5. I always liked the one of my aunt because she was cute. I didn't think the likeness of my father was very good. But now I have the portrait of my father on the wall next to the clock and it pleases me. I don't have such an opinion about the accuracy of the painting anymore because who can really remember what he looked like when he was 8? Probably only my father's childhood friend Charles and my aunt and they wouldn't be able to say whether this was a good or bad portrait.
Below those two heirlooms is my absolute mess of a desk. The organization of this desk is remarkably, troublingly similar to my mother's current desk. Sigh. We can both put our hands on what we need, but the piles and files and notebooks are not tidy. In our defense, I have seen other business owners' desks, and they don't look so different. We do not live in a paperless world.
And to my left is my mother's piano. This piano has such a story. I cannot imagine anyone who inherits this piano (it is supposed to go to Alissa) ever letting it leave our family. My parents purchased it back when they had no money at all. Apparently it was a big priority for my father that my mother have a piano (she has been playing since she was 3). When we lived in town, the piano was in the corner of the living room of our rowhouse on Q St. Our boxes of blocks lived under it. We learned to play scales and simple songs on it. My mother had a memorized repertoire accumulated over the years and we all have strong associations with specific Mozart and Beethoven and Debussy pieces.
When we moved to Virginia, the piano was jammed into a corner and only played in the winter. Its big claim to fame is that when we had a house fire, it was one of the first things that my parents rescued. In the chaos and stress of the moment, my father couldn't get the legs to unscrew (it is a very heavy piano, a baby grand) so he got his chainsaw and cut the legs in half so they could carry it out the front door. My mother and father and Susan and Chip wrangled the piano into the front yard and there it sat while the house burned. This event was so remarkable that it was on local TV that night. Now my mother's piano still has legs that are a different color from the body. That way we can't forget what this instrument survived.
Well, the rest of our stuff isn't quite so laden with stories. Downstairs we now have a major collection of photo albums and documents from Jon's parents. He has spent a good amount of time finding space in the basement for those mementos. Upstairs we have his grandparents' antique dressers. But the stuff we have collected in our own lifetime doesn't seem quite as special. I like our kitchen collection but I don't care who gets it all. Our Turkish rugs have only been in the family for a few years so it will take a while for them to gain any long term identity.
The point of the Swedish death cleaning book is that you don't want to be a burden on your children or anyone who has to clean up after you. Point taken. I will try hard to keep that in mind and I will try to notice when it seems like I am getting old. The book recommends that we start when we are 65. That sounds reasonable. I will put a note on my desk to remind myself.
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