A REMNANT OF MY FORMER CERTAINTY

My mom saved just about everything I ever did—finger paintings, handwriting practice sheets, coloring pages, construction paper collages, even math worksheets. She carefully collected all my school papers and projects in a box each year. Then, during the summer, she’d seal up the box, label it and have Dad find a place for it somewhere in the basement of the house. When that was full, the attic at the cabin offered the additional space needed to house these treasures.

You are supposed to save your stuff. It’s important. It tells your unique story. And well, you never know, you might just want to look at it again someday. Right?

This was fine for a long time. Stowed away in my parents’ properties, these artifacts of my childhood didn’t bother me. Then, when I moved back to Iowa eleven years ago, Mom and Dad started showing up with these boxes. One by one they trickled in. My husband, William, and I tried to stop the onslaught but Mom left me no choice. She explained that she’d gone to the work to save them so I was obligated to deal with them. “You can throw these things away,” she conceded, “but you have to promise me you’ll look at every thing before you do.”

Before I even began to fulfill my promise to her, Mom died. Soon after, Dad cleaned out the house and sold it. In the process, he dumped lots more boxes in my basement.

Then one day, I was in the basement looking for something and I saw a box that had fallen out of the stack at the foot of the stairs. It was a cute little gray thing. What caught my eye is that it had my name written on it. Curious, I picked it up. One end had a label that read: Gay Nineties Candies.  I opened it up and was shocked to find the corner of my baby blanket, carefully packed with shredded newspaper. 

“Blanky!” I exclaimed, grabbed the piece of blanket and instinctively held it to my nose, just as I had done as a baby. 

What the hell was Blanky doing in my basement? It all started to come back to me. I’d loved that pale pink blanket until it was so raggedy Mom deemed it a trip hazard when I carried it and a choking danger when I slept with it. I didn’t care, though. I adored it. Somehow, she was diplomatic enough to convince me to let her trim off the worst parts. I have no idea how she managed this. Over time, she cut more and more off—not unlike the manner in which the Gingerbread Man got himself eaten by the fox. Eventually, there was nothing but a small, stained corner of the nylony edging. Then, Mom boxed Blanky up for me and hid it away. 

That blanket had given me years of unmitigated strength. I used to tuck it into my diapers and run around wearing it as a superhero cape. I’m not sure why I didn’t tie it around my neck like a normal superhero. I don’t know, but it still worked this way as you can see by the picture below. 

Yes, that's me—a little thumb-sucking, diaper-caped toddler sitting in the doll house my father made for my sister and me (an exact replica of the house in which we lived).

Like the security blankets of countless children around the world, Blanky was a friend and a physical symbol that I was safe—that the world couldn’t conquer me.

Now, in the dim basement, I held the remnant of my former certainty. It actually didn’t smell as bad as it looked. I remember it had smelled so good, particularly with my thumb tucked into my mouth under my blanketed nose. I sniffed it again. It it smelled like stale seventies. All the power had gone out of it.

Should I have had more of an emotional response to this rare find? I mean, it had waited decades for me and now I was dismissing it in a matter of minutes.

I summoned enthusiasm and ran upstairs with the box. “Look!” I told William, “I found the last bit of my baby blanket!” He glanced up from his computer with zero reaction. 

“Isn’t that interesting that my mom saved it for me?”

“Yes,” he said flatly.

I shrugged, placed it back in the time capsule box from which it had come and took it downstairs.

In the following weeks, I continued to think about that event and about all the stuff of my story. Why is it that we in the Western world place so much emphasis upon our physical possessions? Yes, our things can bring us joy, and so we think they’re important. Yet they only have the meaning that we give them and we are in great danger of being overrun by them. As the years pass, it is the story rather than the stuff that retains its value.

So in order to plumb the depths of my story, I’ve decided to embark upon a journey through my stuff. My goal is two-fold: to explore how these saved items help me remember and tell my stories and to clean my cluttered basement.  That’s because once I’ve written about my things, I intend to get rid of them. I do believe that this is the only process by which I can let them go and be free to move forward with my life story.

I invite you to tag along as I take on this project. May it inspire you to think differently about your own stuff and more importantly, your story. Please feel free to comment about how these writings affect you. I’d like for this to be a conversation.

Now, let the adventure begin!