Collecting
My grandparents’ house was built in 1919, the year my grandmother was born. It is a yellow two story with a lime stone foundation on a dead end street, in what is now a run down part of town. It is one of those old, narrow homes with a front door in direct alignment with the back door.
My grandparents moved into the home in 1956 and raised my mother there. When I was little I was afraid to sleep upstairs because I thought a great-aunt passed away there before I was born. Now the house stands empty of the living. My grandfather died when I was 10. In May my grandmother passed away. All that is left are ghosts and memories
I’ve spent a good portion of time this summer helping my mother, the only child, go through and sort belongings she’s inherited and prepare the house for sale.
Two or three days a week my mom goes through room by room, bit by bit, sorting out our family’s past. We have found some amazing discoveries in old folders, photo albums and boxes tucked away in nooks and crannies where my Grandmother hid items. We’ve come across old images of my grandfather, shirtless and barrel chested in some tropical setting during World War II and my grandmother, young and vibrant, showing her gams off on some lakeside beach with her brother and sisters.
We’ve also found some very nice, old jewelry, glass beaded handbags from my great-great grandmother still intact, and this fantastic set of World War I leather stamped postcards and medals from a great grandfather, we believe. As we go through this process we remember my grandmother was a keeper of things and recorder of secrets, her own and others.
And of course it all hasn’t been handbags and high heroics. As I’ve went through this stuff with my mom I’ve learned of affairs, rivalries, tragic lives cut tragically short, and other unmentionables. Of course for my mother this remembering is sad but healing. For me, who loves discovering, this is one last opportunity to hear their tales told as I did when I was a boy sitting at their kitchen table listening to them tell family lore.
