If my house had the equivalent of a computer’s brain, it would be stuck on overload.
Those 40 million people a year who move get rid of stuff; my living in the same house for 52 years has let me keep much too much of everything – anything that might be needed some day, clothes that might eventually fit, and sentimental keepsakes.
How else to explain three roasting pans, wrong-sized dresses in the back of my closet, hundreds of records and tapes, a mountain of magazines and books, innumerable letters, and the kids’ artistic efforts of 40 or more years ago?
Perhaps I was influenced by my parents’ thriftiness during the Great Depression. They feared that my dad’s job might be lost in an instant like those of one out of every four workers, some 13 million people. Frugality ruled our household.
At mealtimes, my sister and I were given small helpings; we had second portions only if we had eaten all of the first serving. We were expected not to waste anything, especially food, and always were reminded of others who had nothing. (I never understood how eating everything on my plate helped those less fortunate, especially the starving Chinese.)
Mom’s economy influenced our clothing, too. My sisters’ and my shoes were purchased a size too large, so that we would not outgrow them before they wore out. Cotton wadded in the toes kept the shoes from rubbing blisters on our heels. If the soles wore through, a thick piece of cardboard placed inside covered the holes and extended the shoes’ life.
When I was in ninth grade, my mother purchased a lovely camel- hair coat for me, with sleeves so long that they reached almost to my fingertips. At first, I wore it with the cuff turned back. Three years later, the threadbare sleeves were above my wrist.
Owning only one book when I was young made me a frequent library user. Having a few toys made me treasure the ones I had. Two dolls – a bisque-headed one and an Bye-lo Baby – are still tucked in a basement trunk. Money for entertainment then was limited to an occasional 10-cent matinee, so my sister and I read, followed-the-leader, kicked-the-can, hopscotched, and played cards, especially Pound.
I also married the son of a packrat who had inherited his mother’s keep-everything tendencies, including the paper listing the timing of her labor pains when he was born. His parents’ 100-year-old oak table is in my dining room. In the linen closet are their never-used beautiful sheets monogrammed “WNT,” the wrong size for my beds and the wrong initials for everyone else. I treasure my parents’ intricately carved coffee table bought before I was born and my mom’s 1928 White sewing machine ensconced in a walnut desk. My dad’s music-box brown jug not only holds beer but plays “Little Brown Jug.”
Most of my husband’s childhood books and hundreds of others share space with sheet music, big-band arrangements, and his original compositions. There are multiple scripts of the children’s musicals we wrote and tapes of our animated “Night Before Christmas,” plus boxes of photographs and letters.
Little by very little, I’m parting with some of the accumulation. One son has kept his paternal grandmother’s engagement ring; another son, his grandfather’s gold watch; a daughter, a rolltop desk; and another daughter, cloissone vases and encyclopedias. A talented blind musician now owns our Leslie speaker; a small church, the organ; a grandson, the piano. Many books and player-piano rolls have found new homes, but I still can’t part with the roll my husband began when he was eight, using a razor to cut each note in a roll of shelfpaper made to fit the piano’s mechanism.
Whenever I think about the accumulation, I find its bright side. Information about preserving kumquats, spot removal, or Cairn terriers is here somewhere. Partiers on scavenger hunts come to me first.I’ll never run out of books to read, photos to sort, music to listen to or furniture to dust.
Hanging on to all this stuff has made it impossible to move any time soon from this cluttered, beloved house and all the memories it holds.
Louise Turnbull, a Denver native and retired teacher who has written commercial film scripts and an animated television special, dotes on her garden, her four children and eight grandchildren.
