I came to a philosophical decision when I decided I needed more room. I HAVE more room. I HAD more room. I just wasn’t using it. My personal problem? A family tendency to hang on to ‘heirlooms’ and ‘mementos.’ I later realized that in my mother’s case it was a few heirlooms and the fact she was just prioritizing and new furniture to replace the really old stuff just wasn’t in the cards. <\/p>\n
I came to a great realization when I ended up the possessor of a 4-poster bed and matching suite, and a carpet and a set of silver and glassware—none of which is remotely ‘me.’ Yet—there it was. Heirlooms. Family duty.<\/p>\n
Well, it’s still not me. I shed it toward another family member—I ended up sleeping on a mattress on the floor, eventually, (don’t feel sorry for me: that gave way to a very nice Sleep Number mattress I love—and a platform bed from Walmart: 79.00) —and at least I didn’t have to port that bed to Spokane. Or the rest of it. <\/p>\n
And then I began to figure—I was living surrounded in ‘things’ that were mementos, a dozen of them, all to recall things—but one thing would do the job, and the rest could go. One tiny item can recall a whole period of your life—I have this stupid little green plastic star, for instance–mostly transparent, size of a dime, and I got it from a penny arcade machine on a band trip. That’s enough. With that little star I can remember that night, the park, the people, the rides, the things I liked, the contests, my whole band career. I don’t need anything else. I have this little memory box I started back when I was a kid, and treasures like that star go in there. Only happy memories go in that box—like the plaster cast of a raccoon’s print on a sandbank: beautiful day—I was early teens; it was the edge of autumn; it was one of my most favorite places to hike solo. Reminds me, too, of a period, the Wichita Mountains, the wildlife, and hikes, yes, along the artillery range fence—the day my brother decided he was old enough to go walkabout. It was a four hour search, in an area where, yes, sometimes there were shells from before they put the fences up, and it wasn’t a safe place—I walked that road as far as any kid his age possibly could; then I cut over to the housing development and searched there, and searched areas where I knew he had friends—finally reported in, to find out the rascal been home four, five hours ago, and by then my mother was worried about *me*. But it was funny, once I had had enough iced tea, and bandaged my blisters. That’s what the memory box is. One item. You pull up the rope from that well—and a whole world comes with it.<\/p>\n
If an item recalls even part of something I’d as soon forget, say, anything from the second through fifth grade, out it goes. Don’t need the classroom part of those years. Sixth was better. But I only need one item. If it doesn’t fit in that box, I really have to ask why I need it.<\/p>\n
So, yes, my own bedroom furniture is mostly Walmart or the equivalent. But I can change it when my mood changes. I have sitabouts, but they’re things that make me smile, not launch into maudlin memory. Amnesia, correctly applied, is a good thing. There’s nothing in my living space that represents anything rotten. And there’s nothing I hate-but-have-to-pass-on. I do my service to the generations by keeping track of people—genealogy—I don’t keep a bedroom suite that’s not my taste. I’m living my life, not somebody else’s. <\/p>\n
Time for another ‘shed’ of stuff. This time it doesn’t need to be much, but it’s amazing how one item you don’t know what to do with becomes the nucleus around which ‘stuff’ gathers, until it’s like that great trash-collection in mid-Pacific. More flotsam keeps swirling in to join it until you not only have a table you don’t like, you have things you don’t need atop the table you don’t like.<\/p>\n
It feels rather liberating to see that item out the door.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I came to a philosophical decision when I decided I needed more room. I HAVE more room. I HAD more room. I just wasn’t using it. My personal problem? A family tendency to hang on to ‘heirlooms’ and ‘mementos.’ I later realized that in my mother’s case it was a few heirlooms and the fact […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":751,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3745","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-journal"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cherryh.com\/WaveWithoutAShore\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3745","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cherryh.com\/WaveWithoutAShore\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cherryh.com\/WaveWithoutAShore\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cherryh.com\/WaveWithoutAShore\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/751"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cherryh.com\/WaveWithoutAShore\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3745"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.cherryh.com\/WaveWithoutAShore\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3745\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cherryh.com\/WaveWithoutAShore\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3745"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cherryh.com\/WaveWithoutAShore\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3745"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cherryh.com\/WaveWithoutAShore\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3745"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}