At our house, we’ve been getting rid of what we’re not using. The other night a young father came and bought the Thomas the Train toddler bed that Ethan has outgrown. Perched on his new bed, Ethan didn’t care about the sale, too busy assessing the improved view out the bedroom window. But I watched the bed being loaded into the back of a pickup truck, Thomas’ smiling face looking out at the driveway.
I asked my oldest son, Mac, the original owner of the bed, if he was sad to see it go.
“A little,” he said, picking up a Lego ship and heading upstairs. “Not too much.”
I remembered when my parents bought Mac the bed, when he was three years old. I thought of his sweet round face when he saw the bed set up for the first time. I’d knelt down and tucked him into that bed for two years. And I’d done it again for my third son.
I thought of the year and a half that Mac had used that bed while TJ had slept in a toddler race car bed, and they were set up side by side, car and train, two tiny travelers in the night. And then, years later, when Ethan got the Thomas bed and made anyone who came into our house go immediately into his room to see it and sit on it.
The night of the sale, Ethan asked the young father to come up and see his new big bed, to check out how high it was and how it was going to have a drawer underneath it with another mattress, so someone could sleep over. It seemed things had come full circle.
When the bed had been sold and the money tucked away into this year’s Christmas fund, I pointed out to the kids that we’d had that bed for nine years. I wanted something concrete to replace the washed away feeling I had. I could feel time moving forward, each of these small people forever changing. I wanted to stop the motion, just for a moment, to keep them as they were, and to stay right where I was.
*****
After my mother died, my father wanted to clean out her closets. Probably the sight of all the things she would never wear again was too much for him. Or maybe it was the memories of her in each piece of clothing – the paint spattered shorts, the tank tops she’d worn in the summer, out on the swing in the back yard.
I told my dad I would do it. I knew it was a task that would overwhelm him. He would think too hard about what to do with each thing.
My mother had been a master organizer and clearer of clutter. I had witnessed her cleaning out her mother’s condo, after Grandma Anne had died from breast cancer when I was sixteen. I had seen how to detach, to remind yourself that things are only things and to just get the job done.
My husband came with me, and so did the four kids. I started in my mother’s old room while John distracted everyone for awhile. I made a box of things I would keep and wear, but I was careful not to put everything in it. I packed up her shoes, even the brown clogs I wanted, because they were a half size too small. I held the black cowboy boots for a moment before putting them in. They were shoes she’d worn all the time, before her treatments had made her feet cold and numb and she had to wear thick socks and comfortable shoes. I made huge bags to donate, knowing that was what she’d want. She would not want us standing there fretting over each item. Her voice was in my ears, they’re just things, they’re not me.
I moved on to the guest room where the closet was filled with more special items: a green velvet dress, a dark pink pants set. My father began coming in to see how I was doing, bringing with him coats from the entryway closet, fleece jackets from downstairs. He was disturbing my sense of order. His eyes fell to the pink pants and blouse. It was an outfit he’d seen at weddings, dinner dances, years ago before my mother was sick.
“Those were her stepping out clothes,” he said, tears in his eyes.
My heart was breaking. It had been breaking since the day I’d found out she had cancer, four years before. But I could be lost in my sadness or I could try to be like her and just get this done for him.
“I know,” I said. Then, “I have things all set in here.”
He left to go check on the grandchildren, who missed my mother in their own way, but kept playing, using all the toys she’d carefully picked for them over the years.
My husband came in to ask which bags were ready. I showed him which ones and then I opened a bin and found a pile of perfectly folded clothes, just like all the other bins I’d opened. But in this one was a pale blue-green silky material, iridescent beads…
“Look,” I said, “it’s the dress she wore to our wedding.”
He looked sad while he nodded. That day had been so perfect and warm. We’d taken pictures out on the lawn. My mother and I had held hands in front of the white birch tree, caught on film admiring each other.
But the dress was not my size and would make some other woman happy. It would have more life with someone else than if it was hanging in my closet unused.
I kept the lace mantilla she had carefully folded in a dresser drawer, the same dresser I’d investigated as a child, sliding open the drawers and looking inside ring boxes, smelling the wood smell. The mantilla was pinned to her hair on her wedding day, her face beneath it almost pixie-like, more beautiful than I would ever be.
When I was done, we packed everyone into the minivan and I kissed my father good-bye and told him I’d call him tomorrow. He hugged me tight, thanking me as he had thanked me so many times since my mother’s death only days before. He needed so much help suddenly – when before he’d never needed any.
After I brought the kids home and got them settled in with John, I told him I was going to go drop off the clothes. My whole van was filled with bags and I knew if I didn’t do it now it would only get harder.
I drove to the market with purpose. I felt that my mom would have been proud of me – going through her things the way she had gone through her mother’s things and also my father’s mother’s things. I was never asked to help because it was understood that I could not. I was known as the sensitive, sentimental one. She was the one you called if you couldn’t bear to do it yourself.
I felt my mother with me as I hefted the huge bags into the donation bins, one by one. And then, as the last bag was going in, the top of it opened and a boot fell out. It was one of her cowboy boots.
There couldn’t have been an item that was more “her.” I touched the leather one last time, felt the small chain that hung at the ankle. I bid it good-bye and put it into the bin, since its partner was already inside.
