White gloves

What sets wilderness apart in the modern day is not that it's dangerous (it's almost certainly safer than any town or road) or that it's solitary (you can, so they say, be alone in a crowded room) or full of exotic animals (there are more at the zoo). It's that five miles out in the woods you can't buy anything.”
― Bill McKibben, The Age of Missing Information 

Author Bill McKibben and film maker Annie Leonard have been front-and-center in my head these days. Both have focused on the environmental crisis and have suggested that we all have too much “stuff”. They say that we need to reuse, recycle and “up-cycle” rather than making and buying new stuff.  It is pretty clear to me these days, that they are right. But they are also very wrong.

H and I closed on our house on June 26, moved on the 28^th and 29^th and that night, I raced to New York as Mom was dying. Back in Vermont, the friends who had helped us move had started the unpacking process in the kitchen, but the bulk of the work was left to our friends G and H, who spent the first week of their vacation unpacking china and silverware, decorative bowls, lamps and rugs, so that we could return from NYC without being shoulder deep in boxes. G said she was startled / intrigued/ interested by the accumulation of things that she was unpacking. I was a bit embarrassed but without a place to call “home” for the past six decades, my ideas of home were much embedded in the things I accumulated – a small orange glass vase, paper wasp nests, handmade baskets, and of course, boooooooookkkkkkkks.  In some way, these accumulations were my way of being grounded amid the flux of a life lived perching on other people's nests. 

The move from one house to another was followed immediately by the need to pack and move the things in my mother’s apartment of 60-plus years and to disseminate what remains.

In the coming months, I will have to  dismantle the place she had at the beach (and no, I am not going to discuss our apartment in Medford!).  

But if my friends were startled by my “collections”, it is something I learned at my mother's knee. Herb has written elsewhere that my mother never used one adjective when she could use three, and she was inordinately fond of superlatives. The same was true of the things she kept, and as I go through her things, I have found that she was a hoarder of office supplies, medical supplies and cosmetics and booookkkkks.  Still, there are things that stand out as I come close to finishing the packing of the New York apartment. These include the three rolls of cotton (not the cotton balls, but the flat rolls), six large tubes of a particular soothing Aloe Vesta anti-itch ointment, three tubes of Neosporin (why buy only one at a time?), a pile of unused gift boxes, dozens of tiny bottles of nail polish from her beauty salon in three colors, and 7 pairs of white cotton gloves, 27 pairs of colored kid gloves from black to brown to dove gray, and TWENTY pairs of white kid gloves. Yes, twenty. All white.

[Photo credit: H. Stern]

I find myself wondering whether she knew that she had these gloves, or whether they lay forgotten in a back corner of a drawer behind other accumulations. I find myself wondering whether she bought the brand new white bath towels still unwrapped, because she wanted to leave them to me for the new house. I find myself wondering how the accumulation of dozens of light bulbs somehow made her feel safe when she had grown up under street lamps because in her childhood poverty, there had never been enough money to pay the light bill, so they sat outside playing canasta with the neighbors until bed time. My mother and I argued constantly about her need to leave all the lights on, in rooms she didn’t use. Perhaps it was some subliminal reminder that she would never again be forced to sit on a street corner or fear the dark. As she sat confined to the apartment in her last months, friends suggested that she take a walk to the park at her door, that she sit outside and enjoy the air. She adamantly refused. I am only now, beginning to understand, that this too may have been a reminder of a childhood spent on the street, poor. 

We use marketing campaigns and technological devices to try to remind people that they need to be more energy conscious, when their actions are driven by fear of the dark—literally and metaphorically. We are afraid of one thing, so we absorb ourselves in its opposite, looking odd to our friends and neighbors. I have been afraid of homelessness, so I have accumulated the markers of someone who has been most fully “homed”.  And when we die, our family and friends are left to make sense of what remains behind. Herb and I have no children. When we die, our beloved things will be distributed by someone who barely knows us. There will be no one who cares to interpret the bird nest that I found on the ground beside the rock circle this morning, and that I placed carefully under the antique glass orb fire extinguisher on the porch. It is a perfect fit.

 We are all the product of things and stories that are unspoken. Our actions are consciously and unconsciously shaped by the memories of fear and pleasure, and desire of course. But increasingly in this country, our children or our executors will be saddled with making sense of the things that we left behind. Or they will merely auction what is left, give the proceeds to some nonprofit, and dispose of the rest in a landfill. I have tried several times to give some of my mother’s beloved “things” to non-profit groups for use or for sale, but they are drowning in such gifts and have turned away everything but the clothes and shoes. No three seat couch, no end tables, no lamps, no bed-side reader. Only clothes. And a leopard ceramic garden table (!) and a glass and chrome shelf unit. We are drowning in the things of desire. We are drowning in the things of impulse. And we are drowning in the things that stave off fear of what could be or once was. 

I began this essay, thinking that what I was going to write about was a book I found among Mom’s things. It is not the first edition Matisse that I flirted with keeping but gave to a book seller. Now that we have a partial appraisal for estate purposes, that one book is worth as much as the whole lot of books that he carted away, but I needed to have some things gone, and I didn’t have the time to research each volume, place it on ebay or Craig’s list, wait for someone who needed it more than I needed to keep it.

The book I intended to write about wasn’t among the conservation books that I gave to the college in New York where it will gather dust on their shelves rather than mine.

The book is a paperback called Bizarre Books and it appears to be a result of a competition between two friends, to find the oddest titles published in a given year: The Biochemist’s Songbook and The Resistance of Piles to Penetration among them. In 1978, someone wrote (and published!) Proceedings of the Second International Workshop on Nude Mice (the second!). The book made me laugh. I don’t actually know whether mom ever read it.

But as I go through the old greeting cards, the beloved, now worn clothes, the Kiddush cup that was my grandfather’s, it is a needed moment of levity and I am keeping it. I am also keeping some of her scarves, but none of the leopard ones that she adored. I am also keeping a few of her hats though they are too small for me to wear. I am keeping my grandmother's china and the "wrong" champagne glasses that she bought before she knew that the day's fashion made them unfashionable. I am keeping the cover page of her dictionary, purchased  in 1936 when she was 17. It reads " that I may reach higher and greater things." I am keeping her beloved china cabinet that has no auction value and yes, her wedding ring and those of my grandparents.

I am not sure whether the decisions I made to bring some things to Vermont, and leave others to be dispersed at curbside are wise ones; I nearly gave up the carving set that Nonny (our beloved caregiver and pseudo-second mother) brought from pre-war Germany. They were saved only because I found some ancient notes that my mother wrote about the contents of her china cabinet.

But when H and I die, there will be no one to make sense of our stories through an interpretation of the objects with which we lived. And at a time when I think enviously about people who live in spare Japanese spaces with rooms that can be assembled as sleeping spaces, tea ceremony spaces, and living rooms by rolling and unrolling a single set of tatami mats, I am also grateful for the chance to touch the last 92 years of my mother’s life.  I sort of understood the need to leave the lights on; but it wasn’t until now that I understood her refusal to sit in the park in the last months of her life. And even though she is no longer here to tell me so, I know I am right about why. In short, as I go through the 50 pairs of gloves, she is teaching me something new, even without being here to narrate. It is about how you present yourself. It is about what is covered and what is not. And as I go through the accumulation, I am trying to make sense of the meaning of “stuff” in ways that would make Bill McKibben flush.