Andrew Watch
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At 62, my husband and I must move. This ordinary circumstance has had an extraordinary consequence: Overnight, everything we own has turned to rubbish.
As I write this, I am surrounded by heaving shelves of books. Books stacked upon books, hundreds of books no other living soul wants to dust. Me neither, yet it feels like a thought crime to throw them out. Thankfully, the University of New Hampshire – just an hour’s drive from my current home – said they would take my 40-year-old philosophy books. Let us hope A Profile of Mathematical Logic will elevate another student as it did me.
I hauled one fully loaded Bailey’s Irish Cream box of hardcover fiction to the used book store, but it took just three. They will give the rest away, the proprietor said. Perhaps that was his kind way of sparing us the truth. Rover, our books are going to live on a farm!
One shelf, double deep, holds CDs. Now I’d rather have the 20 bucks each I used to spend on music to buy an iPhone, and so would everyone else.
Recently, I put an ad on Craigslist for my much-loved SLR Pentax K-1000 film camera... yes, film. That trustworthy piece of fine engineering took many stunning pictures of my children at their tenderest early months and many years after. I learned to understand photography on that camera, and to frame the world through its multiple lenses. Two pawn shops refused it.
Fifteen years ago my son stood in front of a Best Buy through the early hours of Boxing Day to snag a discounted 50-inch, rear-projection TV with stylish glass stand. I paid $3,800 for that surprise gift for his father – not including the computer my son built from mail-order parts to allow us to run the TV from the internet. It is still a wonderful TV with a great picture, but it dominates the room and weighs 77 pounds. A new 50-inch TV costs $290 and weighs just 26 pounds. I must pay $100 for the hulking old piece to be hauled away.
Then there’s the bone china dishes of a bygone era when entertaining meant setting an elegant table. These dishes feel like the service for a king and are rimmed with gold, should you not notice the quality of their weight and feel. But alas, they cannot go in the dishwasher, and so, the children don’t want them.
The ungrateful children want nothing. A lifetime of toil, of discriminating acquisition, of care and maintenance, of pride of ownership – everything might just as well be burnt to cinders. It would be a lot less trouble.
Even our beloved piano, an ebony beauty tuned twice yearly, will be lucky to see another home. I remember the day I found it, thrilled with its touch and lustrous sound, and how happy I was that I could finally afford a real piano. Now, my husband wants a digital keyboard so he can adjust the volume – and forgo the tuning.
Our portable tape deck, not used in years, yesterday made its last trip in the car to Best Buy’s recycling centre.
Then there’s our furniture. The look of repressed disdain on my mother-in-law’s face when we bought a brand new set of bedroom furniture 39 years ago is fresh in my memory. She was right, as she truly always was. It wasn’t the quality of the old, mahogany unmatched pieces she preferred, and now that I think of it, maybe had hoped to give to us, but we couldn’t resist the timeless contemporary design of the set we’d bought. We’ve proudly loved that set through five houses, and though it isn’t made of ancient hardwoods, it’s in showroom condition – a showroom from 1979. Even before we list the house, that has got to go. But how? A dated bedroom set is harder to get rid of than a used mattress. Mattress stores will take away your old mattress when you buy a new one. Old bedroom sets? You are thrown on the mercy of less fortunate relatives.
Any parent with a basement has boxes one day to be claimed by children. This past Christmas we compelled our 30-year-old daughter to finally open her six boxes and decide. With ruthless efficiency, she discarded almost every single book. Most were in the public domain, she said, and available on Kindle for $1. We were left with a Queen’s University yearbook from 2008. Thanks! A box of dishes from a dear deceased aunt awaits shipment to her sister’s basement.
Why do aunts have so many dishes? I, too, have my aunt’s wedding set of Pfaltzgraff Brown Drip dinnerware – complete with donkey and wooden cart, circa 1964. She gave it all to me when she moved to Florida. I cannot touch those dishes without thinking of my sophisticated aunt and her wonderful Sunday roasts served on those Flintstone slabs. My husband rejoiced when all the dinner plates cracked in our last move, but what is to become of the 188 pieces remaining? I wouldn’t be surprised if eBay gives you money to keep them.
Still there are things we cannot yet abandon: hundreds of children’s books we’ve saved for our children’s children, should they come; sheet music; art books; a collection of first-edition Canadian fiction given to me by a recently deceased friend; hundreds of plays in paperback; my dining room table – two leaves, eight chairs – and many memories of joyful family dinners before we and our three children somehow found ourselves living in four different places in two different countries.
This is why the self-storage industry is thriving: Children just won’t stand up to their responsibilities to take their parents’ stuff, and parents, foolishly, refuse to accept the inevitable.
Donna Green now lives in Sandown, NH.