Downsizing spaces, not memories

Downsizing Spaces, not memories

Or

TCHOTCHKA memories

 

 

The decision has finally been made after a costly repair to my heat pump and excessively high electric bills while it was running on electricity for almost a month.  I will move to a smaller space, a rental apartment without the angst of home ownership.  37 years living in the same house, watching the children grow and then outgrow their family home, moving on to their own futures; school, spouses, children, careers, homes of their own.

 

I walk through the rooms of my house, many fully furnished but rarely used anymore. First the living room, still used daily and lived in.  The couch, swivel chair, rocking chair and book case in good condition.  They move with me…check.  Easy decision.  The coffee table, shaped like the uneven bark of a tree, knotholes and all.  Of course it stays with me.  I can still remember the entire weekend we spent, Ben and I and two New York friends in New Hope, Pa., visiting a wood working studio.  I wanted the carefully sculpted three piece wooden screen/room divider, with eye holes that cast a subtle light onto the table.  It would never fit our small one bedroom apartment, but the table, its uneven edges, only minimally smoothed surfaces, it has served us well in apartment after apartment, house after house.  Looking at it today, the last day of another year without Ben, I can still hear our laughter as we tried to tie this bulky, weighty table on top of our car with taut ropes.  Ok, that stays with me, it holds more than books and old New Yorker magazines and coffee cups and remote controls. It holds the past.

 

The ancient stereo system, large cabinet still filled with old LP albums; jazz, opera, Broadway musicals, classical music, some classic folk rock.  It stands between two out-sized speakers, products of the early 60’s.  They haven’t been used for over 15 years, so they go. No difficult decision there.  But the albums?  Sell them? Even though I no longer have any way to play them?  Ok, they can go too.    

 

The table that is really a slab of marble atop an ancient sewing machine base, all wrought iron and ornate, that is also precious.  The day was warm, we were browsing in Ellicott City Maryland after the hurricane Agnes flooding.  It had survived and is now covered with pictures of the kids and grandkids on carousels. So yes, it also stays. 

 

Carousels?  I’ve always loved them, spent much of my childhood summers riding them, collecting gold rings, even a boyfriend for a while whose Dad owned the amusement park section with the skee-ball machines and the wonderful painted carousel.  One late August day Ben and I had lunch in Ellicott City and walked toward our car.  In the window of Taylor’s antiques we saw a full size brown, brightly painted carousel horse.  For sale.  For a price we could afford.  For ME!  His name is now Sylvester Stallion, and he lives in our house, wearing an old ascot of Ben’s, an Obama for President hat, ridden by a Barbie doll with pink ribbons in her hair.  Sylvester will stay with me.

 

Pictures on walls display the artist’s creation, but also the stories of where they were purchased or found, or given as gifts to us from artist friends; each has a back story.  A pen and ink drawing of a New Orleans strummer and musician, holding an umbrella and dancing in a parade; Ben was taken by it and purchased it.  It was almost ruined when he set it next to him in an old Oyster Bar in the French Quarter, where water flowed through a trench under the seats (an old fashioned spittoon).  He rescued it just in time.  The photograph of Thelonius Monk, looking down at the piano keys, which are reflected in his sunglasses, has special meaning too.  It was taken by a gifted photographer during the 1960’s in Greenwich Village. I purchased it the year after Ben died. When you look at the photograph, it’s as if Monk was playing just for you.  In a way, he was.  On our first date, November 1961, Ben and I went to hear Monk live at the Jazz Gallery in the Village.  And we sat in the audience and Monk wore sunglasses and he looked down at the keyboard.  I pass the picture daily, and I can still feel the night and the music and the beginning of love.  It stays with me.

 

My professional life, too, is recalled in photos and framed diplomas.  Pictures of the hospital I worked in for 15 years, helping to transform it from a convalescent home for children, aptly named  “Happy Hills Home”, to a state of the art pediatric rehabilitation hospital;  photographs of both the old and new hospital, framed, hang in my home office, a parting gift of thanks to me by the Board.  Photos of legislative bill signings, a Governor’s citation on my retirement working in the Governor’s office for six years; a pen and ink drawing of a child peering over a wall created by a fifteen year old African-American boy working as a summer intern with me in a County Executive’s office.  

 

And of course, the Tchotchkas (trinkets, or inexpensive toys; stuff).  The dented cup my uncle used during World War II in his mess kit ;the brass mortar and pestle that sat on my grandparent’s fireplace mantle; the cut glass vase and pitcher that went from my grandmother to my mother to me, used maybe once yearly;  a plate with Egyptian Cyrillic  symbols we picked up at an antique shop the day we purchased our first house in Baltimore, which hangs on the brick side of the fireplace; a mosaic tile reclaimed from a box in Toledo, Spain; extras from the renovation of a small temple. All have back stories, none that I am willing to part with yet.  

 

I have not mentioned the photographs; all the pictures in collages and frames and on the refrigerator, in scrap books and boxes and computer and smart phone “galleries”. Luckily, they are easily transportable and easy to store for they will not ever be discarded; they are the stuff of memories.