Of course none of us can keep it all. One of my siblings lives in NYC the other in the UK. I still live in the city where we grew up but I never wanted to live in the house we grew up in I am too independent for that; I need to create my own space.
But what made it so difficult to go through the contents and get the house ready for sale was my parents designed their house. It's mid-century modern design; in the suburbs, with alot of land not necessarily well suited for any of us, perfect for my parents.
You learn alot about yourself when you go through your family's belongings. My mother died 18 years before my father and as we went through things she came back to me so vividly.
I learned how lucky I really am to have had such amazing parents, to be in this family as tough as we sometimes are as opinionated. We think about things we do things we make things and we laugh at things.
Yet in many ways I am tormented about what we left behind for the estate sale, or what went to auction. Did we keep the important things? Not the "valuable" things but what has great significance to our family, who we are now and who we once were, who we will be.
I have been working on a series of things we found in our parent's house.
Here's something we found that we couldn't keep so instead a photo:
4 comments:
Penny,
Those are GREAT! Are they books? Are you scanning them so you can print them on fabric later?
I know, what a nag!
lori
Aren't they cool? They are old records for children from the 50's/60's? Some of them are hilarious and became household jokes we kept those. One record in particular gave us a new vocabulary word: botheration.
I do indeed intend to print them out.
Thanks for asking!
Penny
I don't think its about 'stuff', it's about associations with things. When Mum died, a couple of years after Dad, we too found there were certain things we hadn't thought of saving but once she went, they seemed to have an importance after all. Mum did did a lot of needlepoint and counted thread embroidery, so we shared out what we remembered her making, and several of those to close friends and neighbours who had been very kind to her, took our shares of the cake forks and handy things like that, and then felt at peace with letting the most of the other household stuff go. I had not anticipated how we would feel about those things, really. From my parents' house I'd only ever wanted a couple of particular chairs and a couple of watercolours by an artist I remembered meeting when very young, apart from photos of course. And, yes, no one else wanted the chairs or the watercolours, so I now have those.
When a dear old family friend came to the house just before the estate sale she brought a good friend with her. Her friend said when her parents died she could have cared less about the stuff, she didn't collect stuff, she collected people. I realized I collect people too in addition to the stuff!
Isn't it amazing what becomes important after our parent's die? I do love looking in our living room and remembering times with my parents and family. Now we sit on my parents recovered davenport. Admittedly it's more colorful and well you can tell a quilter chose the fabric.
Thanks for posting!
Post a Comment