Lisa Tracy - Objects of Our Affection: Uncovering My Familys Past, One Chair, Pistol, and Pickle Fork at a Time

Too much furniture in ones living room
Too many pens in a stand
Too many children in a house
Too many words when men meet
Too many books in a bookcase there can never be

KENKO (FOURTEENTH CENTURY)

Not fare well,
But fare forward, voyagers.

T. S. ELIOT , The Dry Salvages

I WAS IN THE OFFICE SUPPLY STORE TALKING TO BARBARA , whom Ive known since high school, and she asked what I was working on. Writing a book, I told her, about the family furniture. Like family baggage, I said.

Yeah, I know, said Barbara. Only bigger. We know, because this is who we are. Were Americans in the twenty-first century. We have more stuff in storage bins and basements and attics and back rooms than we can ever use in a lifetime. Or three.

And of all the things we probably should sort through and do something about, the family furniture is in a class by itself. Anytime I tell someone about my own familys voyage through the storage bins and on to the auction house and beyond, the story elicits winces of sympathyand dread. If they havent already wrestled with it, they know the time is coming.

The problem is compounded by the fact that were living in the wealthiest country in the history of the world, and even as we know we should be winnowing, we are wallowing. Its hard to let go of objects because they are full of stories: our stories, our families stories, or, if weve been haunting the flea market or the antiques mall, other peoples stories. They speak to us, as Yeats once said, of what is past and passing and to come. They speak to us of the life we had, and lives we never knew.

I am sitting on a winter morning in the kitchen of a house my grandparents built. Im eating breakfast with my great-nephew, and behind us on the counter is a plastic toy milk bottle that moos when you turn it upside down. His toy, from six or seven years ago. Hes nine as I write. On this particular morning, Im moved to suggest that we might get rid of it. Pass it on to someone else, someone younger, perhaps? Yes, he says unthinkingly, then immediately reneges.

The milk bottle, he tells me, reminds him of when he and his dad were living in the country. One night, his dad was making popcorn in a skillet, and when he took it off the stove and opened the lid, the fluffed kernels exploded all over the place. And when the popcorn blew up, I was looking at the milk bottle, and it put the remembering right in my head, he explains. The memory still makes him laugh uproariously. And this is why, I see, we wont be getting rid of this milk bottle anytime soon.

We can, in fact, never be free of our stuff until we have dealt with the stories it carries. In the end, it does indeed tell us something about who we are. Its just stuff, our possessions. Family furniture. And its what we make of it.

T HE DAY WE PACKED THE HOUSE, I WAS IN THE LIVING ROOM sorting family pictures and papers when the movers came. One mover, to be precise: He was the advance guard, the packing man.

It was a beautiful October day in 1992, still warm but with an edge in the air. Fall had come to the mountains around the small Virginia town where Id grown up, but the flame-colored ridges werent what Id come for. I was wrestling with the contents of a chest of drawers where my mother had deposited a pile of family papers. There were genealogy charts, military commendations, fragments of biographies, letters from the War of 1812, a photocopy of a journal dating from the 1840s, and what seemed like dozens of little framed daguerreotypes of people whose identity was a complete mystery to me. All had to be sorted and packed, because when my sister, Jeanne, came later that week, wed be helping our eighty-three-year-old mother movenot particularly willinglyto a retirement home from the house shed occupied for forty years. It had been her parents house, then hers and Daddys.

She had been living alone for almost twenty-five years now, and people had recently started calling us with worrisome anecdotes and dire predictions, all of course veiled in polite concern, this being a small town where certain formalities still obtained. She was making unexplained withdrawals from her bank account. She would walk aimlessly, turning up at the church at unexpected times. Her driving was atrocious, had been for years.

Mother had told us herself that she really didnt think she should be living alone, and for a while my nephew had lived at the house with her. Wed looked for live-in help without much success. There werent many options. Id found only one candidate, a woman who didnt drive and who smoked. Were a small family, just Jeanne and me in our generation, and we were both living hundreds of miles away. What were we to do?

The only retirement homewe didnt want a nursing home, just someplace safe where she would have helpwas the old hotel, a relic of an earlier time, as the worn carpet and small, rather dark rooms reminded us when I went with her to look at it. She agreed to the corner room overlooking the street all too close to our househer housejust a quick walk down to the corner, across the street, and down the alley. Acceded with teeth clenched, a gracious face, and the steely determination to fight again as soon as the opponents back was turned. We thought she was adjusting remarkably well to the inevitable. She fooled us.

The men of the familyon both sides, Mothers and Daddyshad been high-ranking military officers, their wives gracious hostesses. The accumulated social power of that household, reflected in all its furnishings and memorabilia, made moving out quite a comedown. For Mother, leaving all that gentility behind must have seemed like an admission of weakness, a failure, a defeat. She was abandoning ship, and I think it broke her heart. But, as was typical of our true-blue military family with its Victorian ways, she didnt say, and we didnt ask, how she felt about it. She put on her stiffest upper lip and moved.

She would be dead within six months. But we didnt know that then, of course. On this mid-October day, the move and all that would follow were still ahead of us, and I was on an archaeological dig, plowing through layers of family possessions wed managed to ignore for decades, or in some cases had never seen before. And thats when the man we would come to know as Roger arrived.