One year ago, my husband and I, with the help of friends, sat in the San Diego sunshine, tables and bookcases filled with the artifacts of our lives–old dishes, vases, kitchen goods, a few paintings, plants, pottery–all a blur now as I try to recall that Saturday afternoon. The week before, we’d sold furniture–indoor and outdoor–that we knew would not transition well from a house to a city apartment in Toronto, pleased with our downsizing, and yet, feeling an odd sense of loss we couldn’t name.
“The effects of moving are experienced in the body, in the imagination, in the realm of desire. What the eye sees, what the body feels, what the heart yearns for, what remains and what has been lost — these are difficult at first to describe.”
― Louise DeSalvo, On Moving: A Writer’s Meditation on New Houses, Old Haunts and Finding Home Again, 2009.
We arrived in Toronto days later, our downsized belongings in transit. Once they were delivered by the movers, we discovered, again, we were not done shedding ourselves of furniture and a number of odds and ends we had optimistically packed into the boxes arriving at our Toronto apartment. It took weeks to settle in and arrange our lives and belongings into a three bedroom apartment after decades of home ownership. We were packed in tightly, but finally, we could shut the doors to crammed closets and get on with life. Now, almost exactly one year later, we are moving again.
As author Louise DeSalvo explored in her 2009 book, On Moving, and what many of us experience, the pain, hope, and turmoil in moving from place to place are nearly universal. We move with conflicted emotions: hope a new home will be a positive change yet fear it may not, nostalgia coupled feelings of loss, yet the excitement of change. We were happy to return to Toronto, the city where we’d met and married, where one daughter and her family live, and where we discovered a sense of “home” still palpable. Yet we missed our friends, the larger space of living in a house, and our deck that hung out over one of San Diego’s many canyons. Our new digs, spacious by apartment standards, seemed confining and small. But gradually, we adjusted and found there was so much in our favorite city to explore or re-acquaint ourselves with besides the long-awaited regular time with our daughter and granddaughter. We began to reclaim our lives as “Torontonians.”
It’s not a transcontinental move we’re doing this year. Our new apartment is located only a short distance from our current building, and is far more convenient for the two of us than our third floor walk-up has proven to be. As eager as we are to have some amenities lacking in this older building, we are faced with somewhat smaller space and the task of downsizing more belongings, packing our lives into containers, and living, for the next few days, among stacks of packing boxes. The most difficult part, just as it was last year, is not the physical labor, rather, it’s the sentimental aspect of sorting through mementoes and objects accumulated through our lives, ones containing memories and personal meaning.
“Every object is full of story.” These are words I recall from the summer writing workshop I attended eighteen years ago in Berkeley. Pat Schneider, author of Writing Alone and With Others (2003), was taking objects from a wicker basket and placing them on a white cloth before us. I was there to venture back into what I loved most—writing—after a long detour through the soul-destroying path of a corporate career. “Objects are how the world comes to us,” she said while we all sat quietly, watching as she placed random things on the cloth: a metal hook, a rosary, shaving brush, wooden spoon…soon the cloth was covered in objects from the past, and Pat invited us to choose one, something that drew us to it without stopping to questioning why.
Just one week earlier, I had just finished seven weeks’ of radiation therapy, and while my skin was still red and tender, cancer was not on my mind as as I listened to Pat’s instructions. Most people were quick to choose, but I held back, slowly scanning the diminishing collection of objects. I felt a wave of anxiety as others began writing. What on earth was I going to write about? That’s when I spotted a half empty pack of old Camel cigarettes. I picked it up, smelled the odor of stale tobacco, and memories flooded back. An image of my father, seated behind the steering wheel of an old Chevy pickup truck, a cigarette in his left hand filled my mind. I remembered how, when I was in high school, a the two of us traveled the back roads of rural Siskiyou County to deliver a washer or refrigerator to a customer. I loved those trips, although I was of little help to him, because I had my father to myself, and I listened with rapt attention as he told me stories from his childhood. He died of lung cancer just eight years before the workshop I now sat in, pen poised over my notebook. I began writing, “He tried them all, Camels, Marlboros, Pall Malls…” Memories of my father clamored for attention. My pen raced across the page. There were so many stories to be captured in one half-empty pack of cigarettes.
This past week, as I’ve gone through drawers, boxes and bookshelves, I’ve stopped frequently, pausing to examine pictures and little things wrapped in tissue, tucked into the corners of those drawers, cabinets and boxes. It’s slow work, because without warning, some small object or picture triggers a memory, a story, the recollection of another time in my life, reminding me of what it was like to be me then, before now. The stories from my life and the people who were important to me are captured in those small mementoes. I rememberd reading Maria Mutch’s 2014 essay, “Ghost in the Machine: A Typewriter, A Postcard, and the Objects of Memory,” which told of her search for an old black manual typewriter, not aware until later that the memories of a dead friend–one who had committed suicide years earlier–were embedded in her search. Her friend had, just before her death, tried to give Mutch her Smith Corona portable typewriter. It’s a beautifully rendered essay, reminding us of how our memories and stories can be triggered by ordinary, everyday objects—trinkets, toys, utensils—from our pasts, objects that while insignificant to others, are dear to us for the memories they hold.
Objects, the everyday tools of our lives, are the triggers for stories, real or imagined. We visit museums and gaze at the artifacts of ancient civilizations and of our ancestors, gleaning a bit of history as we do, but little about the person or the events that are part of what we see behind the glass. What stories might those objects tell us, if only they could speak?
He was a big man, says the size of his shoes
on a pile of broken dishes by the house;
a tall man too, says the length of the bed
in an upstairs room; and a good, God-fearing man,
says the Bible with a broken back
on the floor below the window, dusty with sun;
but not a man for farming, say the fields
cluttered with boulders and the leaky barn…
Something went wrong, says the empty house
in the weed-choked yard….
(“Abandoned Farmhouse,” by Ted Kooser, In: Sure Signs: New & Selected Poems, 1980)
Significant Objects (2012) is a pictorial collection of random objects coupled with fabricated stories, edited by Rob Walker and Joshua Glenn. It’s the result of a literary experiment designed to answer the question, “Can a great story transform a worthless trinket into a significant object?” The project team invited several well-known writers to invent stories about a collection of secondhand items gathered from yard sales and thrift stores, bought for no more than a few cents to a dollar or two. Over 200 writers contributed to the project, and the collection of objects was auctioned off on eBay. Coupled with a story, those same objects now sold for considerably more than their original price, resulting in thousands of dollars donated to charity!
I sit at my desk as I write this post, half empty packing boxes a few feet away, and memorabilia scattered on the floor nearby. There’s a plastic luggage tag, my father’s name and address written on the card inside in his fine, slanted hand. Next to it, a round fabric emblem made with gold thread, rhinestones and stitching to create a monster’s face–originally sewn on the jacket of the character “The Hooded Fang,” appearing in Toronto’s Young People’s Theatre’s first production of Mordecai Richler’s children’s novel, Jacob Two-Two Meets the Hooded Fang, originally published in 1975. I loved the book about as much as the children I read it to–my two young daughters and elementary school students among them! I was lucky enough to get the Hooded Fang’s jacket emblem from a close friend, who was also the costume designer for the production. Perhaps you understand now why I began packing three weeks ahead of the our moving date. Going through the keepsakes and mementoes slows my progress as I reach for my notebook to jot down yet another story from my life I want to remember.
When I walk in my house I see pictures,
bought long ago, framed and hanging
—de Kooning, Arp, Laurencin, Henry Moore—
that I’ve cherished and stared at for years,
yet my eyes keep returning to the masters
of the trivial—a white stone perfectly round,
tiny lead models of baseball players, a cowbell,
a broken great-grandmother’s rocker,
a dead dog’s toy—valueless, unforgettable
detritus that my children will throw away
as I did my mother’s souvenirs …
(“The Things,” by Donald Hall, In: The Back Chamber, 2011.)
Writing Suggestions: I’ve just paused, again, to gaze at the collection of little memorabilia on the bookshelf near where I sit each morning to write: a piece of obsidian from the lava beds in Siskiyou County where I spent my childhood, a small clay bird, a roughly sculpted ballet slipper made by a child… Every object has meaning, and each has its story to tell.
- What objects or keepsakes do you have tucked away in drawers or placed on shelves or tables? What memories and meaning do they hold? Think of those objects as the keepers of stories. Choose one (or more) and write the story, the memories that each represents.
- Begin with one object or photograph. Hold it and examine it closely using all the senses you can. Let the object or photo take you to the story or poem contained within it. You might be surprised at how much you have to write about.