Ten years ago, I started a project—a design project, a “book,” neatly foreshadowing my career as yearbook editor—intended as a graduation present for several friends in the 8th grade. Words, pictures, quotations, arranged and selected by me, it was designed to bring a tear or a smile to my friends’ faces; to try to tell them, even then, just how much they meant to me. I suppose I was beyond my years and full of affect for a 13-year-old...
And I didn’t finish the project. I forgot about it entirely, and I’m finding the remnants of it now, in a manila envelope on a dusty bookshelf.
It’s funny to find here, day after day, how little has changed. I still love books and wise quotations and designing things and starting projects and I still can’t ever tell my friends to my satisfaction just how much I care about them. And I still don’t finish things. I won’t dwell on it now, but the list is very long. My shelves are full of books with markers permanently wedged at page 67 or 123. For every book I finish, I start two ill-fated ones. But, I've earnestly been trying to curb all that lately. In the last year, I’ve finished nearly every book I’ve started, and I’m trying to read only one or two at once.
Maybe this massive room-cleaning project is just the task I needed. I’ve been reverting back to my old-self—pre-China, pre-London, pre-college, maybe even pre-high school—when I was supremely content to retreat to my space, surrounded by my books and small objects. I am learning how to be an introvert again. But, this time around, I’m also trying to slowly reduce the weight of the house.
I imagine picking up our house by the ears and dropping it onto an old brass scale to see how much it weighs. How many tons do my books and shoes and ceramics and grand piano contribute? What about mom’s books and magazines and pictures and seashells? And how much is dad’s share—his piles of “useful” pack-rat objects that fill all the hidden spaces and spill out into the common areas? I’m trying to reduce my share because that’s the only part I can change; the only piece I have any control over; the only area where I have any say. (It’s figurative, really.)
So I’ve spent a lot of time sifting through my old treasures lately. Uncovering them and running my fingers over their dusty, glassy surfaces brings on waves of honey-soaked nostalgia. And strangely… forgetfulness.
I discovered a small, porcelain jewelry box with two doves on top that was filled with small objects: a black plastic spider ring, a piece of green foam, and a sticker that had lost its stick. I must have once placed them there, in a fragile, white box, because they meant something to me; because they conjured a memory. But staring at them now, I couldn’t recall what they stood for or why it had been so necessary to safely and secretly guard them.
With a few moments' consideration, I slid the tiny pieces into a shiny, black garbage bag. After consulting with mom about its origins, the porcelain dove box made its way into a pile destined for the Groves garage sale. (Note the passive voice.)
These knick-knacks—the music boxes, the wind chimes, the decorative dried chilies from Santa Fe, the blown glass whale, the friendship bracelets I wove with my 11-year-old hands, even the plastic spider ring—were once my treasures. They meant something to another version of me; to a person I no longer am but still find traces of in unfinished projects and in the little things that cover my shelves and keep me company.
Which will be the firsts to go when I next return here to purge my life, to lessen the literal and figurative weight that fills my secret spaces? Will it be the glittery star boxes that my cousins, Tess and Daniel, painted for me when they were younger? Will it be the tiny, stuffed, yellow bear that my student, Phil, gave me in Qingdao—one of the few teachers’ presents I was able to bring back across the ocean with me? Will I have forgotten his name by then, and all the others’?
Or, more likely, it will be the large seashells on my top shelf, which I removed from Mr. Ed’s mom’s house after she died—my first brush with cleaning out an old woman’s house and one of my only brushes with the hollow spaces that come in death’s wake. By the time I decide her echoing conch shell is doing me no good, we will probably have gone through both of my grandmothers’ houses, filling our rooms to the brim once again with the leftovers of their lives, with the treasures that mean everything to them and nothing to us.
In The Hurt Locker, the protagonist marvels at his son’s fascination with a jack-in-the-box; how that spunky toy—or any object, really—is enough to keep his young son captivated and content. “By the time you get to my age,” he says, “maybe it’s only one or two things” you really love.
So I’ve begun trading in my well-loved possessions—some stuffed animals, dolls, and games have been relegated to closet shelves; some are slated for the garage sale or Salvation Army; some are in the trash. My books remain—too precious to part with—but my real prizes now are shiny and foreign compared to my old favorites: the jewelry I acquired over four years of working for Barbara; my assortment of pictures of old and faraway friends; the pile of bracelets from Beijing and Qingdao, especially the celadon jade bangle Tracy gave me on my last day, even though it now lies shattered into two heartbreaking pieces. And finally, my maroon backpack gathering dust in the corner—the turtle-shell home that has served me so well in every corner of the world.
There was a time when this blue-carpeted room was my world—filled with my stuffed companions and curio comforts. But now, having a light load is what matters; having less cargo. So, one day, my turtle shell and I can once again slip off the face of the earth, in search of everything we can’t find within these walls.
This poem by Richard Wilbur is one of my absolute favorites. Its imagery and meaning struck me so much the first time I read it that I actually burst into tears.
For me, it conjures up a vision of the yellow Victorian farm house on Williamston Road on the way to my aunt’s house, a building that, since I was a kid, I have wanted to explore and inhabit. I imagine being The Writer of this poem, shut in the atelier of that yellow house, writing away, while my dad observes from distant creaky floorboards.
But it couldn’t be my dad, in actuality, because he doesn’t possess the deft touch of subtlety that this poem’s speaker enjoys. Rather, I wish it were him. Or in lieu of that option, I imagine myself with the speaker’s voice. I am not a father wishing “a lucky passage” to his daughter, but to a smaller version of myself—to a person who once coveted and honored and treasured small things, and who filled sheets and sheets of paper with thoughts and stories, just as the bigger version does now.
Grab the tissues. This one is startlingly beautiful.
The Writer
--Richard Wilbur
In her room at the prow of the house
Where light breaks, and the windows are tossed with linden,
My daughter is writing a story.
My daughter is writing a story.
I pause in the stairwell, hearing
From her shut door a commotion of typewriter-keys
Like a chain hauled over a gunwale.
Young as she is, the stuff
Of her life is a great cargo, and some of it heavy:
I wish her a lucky passage.
But now it is she who pauses,
As if to reject my thought and its easy figure.
A stillness greatens, in which
The whole house seems to be thinking,
And then she is at it again with a bunched clamor
Of strokes, and again is silent.
I remember the dazed starling
Which was trapped in that very room, two years ago;
How we stole in, lifted a sash
And how for a helpless hour, through the crack of the door,
We watched the sleek, wild, dark
And iridescent creature
Batter against the brilliance, drop like a glove
To the hard floor, or the desk-top,
And wait then, humped and bloody,
For the wits to try it again; and how our spirits
Rose when, suddenly sure,
It lifted off from a chair-back,
Beating a smooth course for the right window
And clearing the sill of the world.
It is always a matter, my darling,
Of life or death, as I had forgotten. I wish
What I wished you before, but harder.
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