TheBanyanTree: Re: Piles

[Juanita Hazelton]

Mother is downsizing.  She is moving from the house she shared with my Dad
for so many happy years into a two bedroom apartment.  It will be all on one
floor with no treacherous steps down from her kitchen to her utility room
for me to worry about-- even though she says she's always careful.

 My niece helped her a week ago and this week her younger sister is staying
with her to sort through things and make the piles: keep, throw away, garage
sale.  It is incredibly hard when you are nearly 85 to decide which memories
to keep, throw away, or sell.  And they are all memories -- here is my Dad's
collection of books, and the many, many boxes of home movies taken over the
years.  His Bibles -- no one ever throws away a Bible.  It may be worn out
with many handlings and replaced long ago by a new one, but who can throw
away the Word? Daddy's ties -- What's in this box in the furnace room? -- 
why it's filled with beads and half finished necklaces.  After his heart
attack retired him, he kept his hands busy making necklaces to sell.  A man
who worked at high speed all his life couldn't settle down to slow speed
without something to keep his hands busy.

All the dishes, gathered over the years of raising a family of five
children, entertaining friends and church groups every Sunday -- tupperware
and pyrex, crystal, fine china and everyday, mixing bowls, serving bowls,
dessert dishes, cups and saucers and glasses -- and my grandma's snuff
glasses, just the right size for a glass of water from the sink -- cupboards
full, kitchen full, pantry full of dishes, pots and pans.  The pressure
cooker she cooked her Sunday roast in, every Sunday since I was a child -- 
what becomes of it?  I don't even know how to use it and she never will
again.

Mother and Elizabeth call me over to see which pile is which for the movers
on Saturday.  As I turn into the drive I see the plastic bags piled for the
trash man and peek into one as I pass.  Oh, how could she throw that out!
And that!  In the house a mighty pile of garage sale items occupies the
utility room.  Oh, no, only part of it is garage sale, see, just this bit
here and this bit there, and these few boxes.  Is there anything I want from
the garage sale items?  And maybe Merrill would like this pan here and that
one for his cook outs.   See this bedspread, don't I want it?  And wouldn't
I wear this shirt?  ( I take home a coat I once borrowed from Mother, three
pans for Merrill, the bedspread, a bundt cake pan, an ice bucket -- I think
I can give the ice bucket back to Mother when she is settled in and finds
she has room for it.)

Which furniture to keep and which to sell -- those comfortable gold chairs
they used to have in their motor home, will they fit in the new apartment?
Maybe just one?  And where does the kitchen table go, the one so full of
memories it could fill a library with stories it heard over meals over
years?  There's no room, there's no room! The old rocker, the one older than
I am, that must go to the new home, and Daddy's desk and Mother's lace
curtains, I love her lace curtains, will fit the windows in her new living
room.  I'll take home the quilt rack, I gave it to her long ago, and once
she's found a place for everything, I'll see if she can find room for it
again.

And her flowers!  Mother loves her flowers! All her beautiful roses and
shrubs and perennials -- they have to stay behind.  Even though it will be
my son, her grandchild and and his children who will live here and enjoy her
flowers, how hard it is to leave them behind.  We make plans for her to
teach five year old Katie her garden secrets.  She can come every day and
share her special joy of gardening with Katie.  And we'll surround her new
entry with pots of flowers.  Container gardening will be so much less work.
But see this rose?  That was the last rose my Dad planted -- it's velvet red
beauty is at its most glorious right now.

We walk through every room in the house, the vacant walls empty of pictures
now packed away.  I think the rooms will echo tomorrow once all but
necessities are boxed.  When Elizabeth goes home on Wednesday I think my
Mother will cry to be left alone with her boxes of memories, the keepers,
the throw aways, the garage sellers.  I think I'll have to stay at night
with her to help fill up the emptiness.

I go home wearing a long strand of blue beads from Daddy's bead box.  I go
home with a splinter of Mother's pain in my heart.

Juanita