In the Attic
Once this space was empty, but entire lives are stored up
there now. When we arrived here, 45 years ago, the house was completely empty.
At closing, my husband requested that nothing be left behind, and nothing was,
so we began with a blank slate. Now, forty-five years later, the whole thing is
jammed. First was a set of rustic oak chairs from our Nashville days and a few
end tables.
Then, in rapid succession came a few things of my
grandmother’s—the sad remains that the early bird relatives, (the wealthy ones,
naturally) deemed unimportant or worthless—and then came my mother’s boxes and
trunks when she entered a nursing home—and next came my husband’s mother’s many
well-organized photo albums, a huge collection going back into the early 1930’s,
after she too ended up in “incarcerated”. Sadly, we can’t recognize more than a quarter
of the sepia people who are posed there, giving us those chilly New England half
smiles. These are occasionally enlivened
by images of women holding their cats, a proud New England tradition.
Now all it gathers dust. Some important boxes filled with memorabilia—(a
box full of Babylon 5 dolls) I would like to find have vanished—gone without a
trace when I went to locate them later. Perhaps they’ve fallen into some
Twilight Zone like void, the sort that appears to exist in the upper stories of
many houses. It’s preferable to think this than to suspect, as I often do, that
my husband, in a fit of jealous pique, deep-sixed them.
We’ve thought of cleaning it, of sorting through, of discarding
most and preserving the few things that might still have some interest and/or
value to the next generation. Then summer comes again and we abandon the place
for another six months. Next autumn, we think, next spring, but somehow it
never happens.
Our stuff is there, too. A host of coffee mugs emblazoned
with the names of once famous and now long dead Tech companies, virgin boxes of
tractor-feed paper, old woolen tartan skirts made in Scotland made for 70 lb. adolescent, boarding school jackets and work books from 5th & 6th
Form English school days—Ordinary Level tide-pool biology and Advanced Level European
History, as well as Latin grammar--boxes adjacent to my husband’s pale blue slacks purchased
for 1970’s office/casual Fridays...
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~~Juliet Waldron
