The Tiger in the Bin

I am the caretaker of a permanent collection, a museum of qualified superlatives. Pieces have accrued over a long time and need collating and tagging, yes, but the whole exhibition reveals the flavor of our family—the theme, minus the things we regret tossing out, minus items eaten or worn out or loaned to other institutions.

As manager of the store, I’m fascinated by an Icelandic practice described by A. Kendra Greene in her book, The Museum of Whales You Will Never See. Greene noticed commonplace objects in home window dioramas, set facing whoever is outside looking in.

In our dining room window, I imagine setting out my son Ben’s matchbox cars—in a train, as he used to do—and settling my daughter Sarah’s handmade earrings and pottery among the toys. At one edge of the window, I could prop up my grandfather’s poetry journal inscribed to him from my grandmother: to J.F.J. from M.V.O. At the other end, I’d pose the jeans jacket Sarah wore for a decade and the purple slip-on shoes Ben wore in elementary school.

Each month, I could lower the blinds and create the next scene. Keeping it fresh for the audience.

■■■

Breast cancer stifled something in me, five years ago. A vague sense of nihilism came over me, amplified, more recently, by the pandemic years. I may never buy another lamp, another clock, another bedside table. We have enough, I declared. Time to start pushing things out the door.

It’s not so easy, though.

I’m particularly paralyzed by the stuff Sarah and Ben left behind, not completely sure what is theirs, what is mine. The kids don’t live here anymore, but the upstairs jack-n-jill bedrooms are still full of their things. Adults, now, they’ve moved to other states—north and west—and settled onto sofas dragged from sidewalks, thumped up concrete steps, over thresholds, into small spaces without televisions or landline phones. When one of them visits, I am careful in my timing, suggesting, offhandedly, “Maybe later you could look through the stuff in your bureau?” But they are busy/disinterested/overwhelmed/anxious and “maybe later” rarely comes. I’m generally alone on a floor, mulling over what each piece means, why I shouldn’t drop it into the trash, or the recycling, or the donation pile.

Not long ago, Ben and I were in our basement storage room looking for a good mailer box. My back was to him as I sifted through various sizes of cardboard containers. When I stood up and turned around, I saw my grown son lift one corner of a plastic bin and slip his hand inside to touch the head of his childhood companion, the Calvin and Hobbes stuffed tiger he’d slept with and carried in his backpack on airport trips. Pat, Pat, Pat. Then he withdrew his hand and popped closed the corner.

So, Hobbes is safe, then, having cleared the bar of essential worth.   

When no one is left who remembers the medals and costumes, they will be easy to toss.   

When no one remembers, they will be trash.

■■■

In my parents’ garage, an old mattress stood on end along with a single-bed metal frame. Nearby, a light blue and white playpen was collapsed into a netted square.

“Daddy, why are you keeping that mattress?”

“Maybe Sarah or Ben will want it someday.”

“But they don’t live in North Carolina. They don’t even live in Kentucky. Sarah bought her own mattress when she moved to New York.”

Daddy shrugs.

“And the playpen?”

“I could probably give away the playpen.”

That playpen looks like trash, to me. Wouldn’t meet safety codes. Must be mildew in the fabric, rust in the hinges. But Daddy leaves it there, against the garage wall, as though someone will want it, that soft tent where children babbled and pulled to standing, reached out their arms to be picked up.

I unrolled brown grocery bags stored in front of where Daddy parks his Chevrolet. Inside one, I found old Simplicity and Butterick sewing patterns, and my thoughts flashed back to a fabric store somewhere in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, where I sat atop a high stool looking at oversized hardcover books, too heavy to lift. I turned shiny pages of tall, skinny ladies modeling the latest fashions, entertaining myself while Mom and Grandmother Jarratt chose fabrics for my new clothes. Wish I’d paid more attention so I could tell you what they said to one another, but I can only imagine them whispering about the cost and which materials were appropriate for a church dress. Maybe Mom felt inadequate since she couldn’t sew, and she was beholden to her mother, who could. Maybe Grandmother Jarratt shifted aside the patterns with skirts too short, the fabrics with colors too loud.

I was required to take home economics in junior high, long ago, when the Watergate hearings were being televised. My efforts resulted in a blousy sleeveless top with the flowery collar sewn on upside down. It’s saved in one of my own basement bins, collar now right-side up.

In the middle of the garage, Daddy opened a tall ladder and asked me to hand up the Christmas decorations. My eighty-two-year-old daddy climbed up the rungs to that point where I’d feel dizzy, then he told me to give him the Christmas tree shaped out of wood, spray-painted green. And then the blue box. And then the decorative rugs. And then the large flat rectangular box, the kind that would fit under a bed. Daddy sat each item on a square of plywood in the ceiling of the garage directly over where he parked his car. He’d figured out how to stack each item so the lot would fit in the space and not fall on our heads.

“You know, Daddy, if you got rid of some of the items around the edge of the garage, you wouldn’t have to climb up here every year to store the Christmas decorations.”

He cleared his throat and didn’t answer for a few seconds. “I know that.”

I drove to Target and bought clear plastic containers and sat outside with a rag and the brown grocery bags. One by one, I wiped dust and dead bugs off the sewing patterns, moving them from the risk of water and mold into a storage container made of materials not in existence when these things were first put in the attic, before landing in the garage.

My parents didn’t ask me to put that stuff into plastic bins. They didn’t even seem excited by what I’d found in the grocery bags. Maybe they’d left all that stuff in the garage to decay into rust and ash, one item falling into the one below, like strata of sedimentary rock. And here I came along and disrupted their plans.           

■■■

Nana, my mother-in-law, moved into a retirement community four years ago and her big house stands empty of people most of the time. Her five kids keep discussing what to do with it, when to sell it. It’s expensive to keep up an empty house. The insurance, the lawn, the electricity, the property taxes.

Then there’s all the stuff.

My sister-in-law manages the finances and is the caretaker of Nana’s collection. She suggested we inventory each item, room by room, and maybe, whenever one of us visits, we can do a room, or a closet. Type the details into an Excel document, shareable online. We all responded with silence.

We’ll all be there soon, for Christmas—Nana’s five children, and spouses of her children, and her eight grandchildren—filling up the spaces and walking past clocks and framed portraits, sitting on the sofas and chairs, rummaging through holiday storage boxes, smiling at one another.

On the second floor, there’s one narrow closet filled completely with artwork, many created by Nana. She can’t remember all the details, though, so we’ll pull out pieces and stare at them.

“Is it one of hers?”

“I don’t recognize it.”

“The next one, behind it, the one with the abstract people and houses?”

“I don’t know.”

And the closet will feel small with the dim light and all those canvasses looming and leaning, and we’ll feel uneasy, worried we will not know which paintings were created by our mother/mother-in-law/grandmother. We should be able to tell.

■■■

In an essay about “clutter,” the author made a distinction between terminal materialism and instrumental materialism, connecting the former to things that will become obsolete, and the latter to things we value for their meaning, for their association to experiences and people in our memories. The adjective “instrumental,” though, conjures objects valued for their usefulness—the best whisk, or vacuum cleaner, or stapler. Those items that stay in our homes—because they are our tools—until they are worn out. We may be disappointed when we drop them into the garbage or recycling bin, but we do not weep.

“Instrumental materialism” is inadequate to describe the stuff I wrap in tissue paper or settle back on bookshelves. The stuff that makes me sigh. The stuff of echoes, symbolizing the whos and whats of my already-happened life.

“Associative materialism” would be a better term. Or metaphorical materialism. Sensory materialism. Representative materialism. Flashback materialism. Fragile materialism.

Until-I-have-dementia materialism. 

If I can remember my dad pulling the kids in the little red wagon, I am still here. If I can remember lying on a bean bag beside Ben’s bed and reading aloud My Side of the Mountain, I am still here. If I can remember Sarah clutching her stuffed dog Patch to her cheek, her wispy baby hair around her face, I am still here. They are still here.

■■■

When Mom handed down my great-great-grandfather’s Civil War-era Union soldier’s trunk, years ago, I inherited the old books inside. Math and English textbooks. An oversized illustrated history book: The Story of the Spanish-American War and the Revolt in the Philippines. A guidebook for how young ladies should behave. Some volumes bear my aunt’s name, or my maternal grandfather’s name, written inside the front cover. They are long dead, but see, here are their books.

This summer, I lifted the books out, one by one, and spread them out on the carpet. Brittle, some pages loose. I asked my daughter, asked my son, asked my sister, asked my brother, “Do you want any of these?” I asked a local university librarian and a history professor and an artist, “Do you want any of these?”

No one wanted any of the books, but I can’t put them in the trash because Aunt Hazel took me to see Mary Poppins, and she took me to visit Old Salem where I levered water out of an old pump on the town square, and Grandaddy Jarratt is standing beside toddler me, in an old photo, and he wrote poetry and had trouble finding a job.

So I push the plastic bin of books back against the concrete wall of an unfinished subterranean room, the one that leaks in a hard rain.  

■■■

Waters rushed into homes in Eastern Kentucky, one recent July, drowning dolls and tablecloths and Christmas ornaments. Tornados blew apart homes in Western Kentucky, not long ago, scattering baseball hats and wedding dresses and baby clothes. An apocalypse of non-sorting, a devil-sent destruction of all the stuff, indiscriminately, both the loved and the unloved. Media outlets posted photos of wind-strewn objects over there, and floating baskets over here, private belongings weathering without roofs, without walls, without boxes. A woman in a doorway with her dog, standing in mud. A bearded man in a baseball hat sitting in the middle of a great pile of stuff—the corner of a bedframe, upturned cabinets, splayed shirts, rumpled pants, a green ball. 

■■■

My mom used to object when I offered to go through their magazines to separate the “keepers” from the recycling pile. But she hardly notices when I do it, now.

I sit on the floor in the corner bedroom where I sleep during my visits—my brother’s old room—and sift through old junk mail and the tall pile of magazines stored under the bureau there, peeling off address labels as I go. Southern Living. Our State. Baptist church periodicals. I do the same thing in my parent’s bedroom, with a stack left in a large book bag. Wake Forest University bulletins. Blue Ridge Parkway magazines. In the den, I tackle the largest towers beneath the sofa side table and on the white brick hearth. Time. Country music glossies. Good Housekeeping.

I find a few of Mom’s notes to herself—lists for her church library, reminders about upcoming appointments—and I set them aside to keep, scraps of when she knew what day it was and who was hosting book club. I pause and hold up greeting cards and church bulletins, asking Dad, “Save or toss?” I stumble over the old Oxford Americans, as I have trouble recycling that literary magazine in my own home. All those unread essays, poems, and short stories paralyze me, so I organize them by date and return them to the shelf. 

After I dump the last armful into Daddy’s huge roller recycling bin, I hold my phone out and over the inside-the-trashcan view and take a photo of the pile, proud of my success. I’d culled hundreds of volumes from my parents’ house, decluttered their environment. But I pause, there on the back patio. I don’t send the photo to my sister, Amy, or post it to Instagram. I feel a bit ashamed of my hubris. Maybe I’d made a mistake, been presumptuous, sifting for trash in my childhood home, a house that I can no longer call my own. 

I could have declared the middle bedroom—Amy’s old room—to be the museum of magazines, indexed the lot, and arranged tasteful displays along the dresser top, the side tables, the shellacked trunk under the light switch. I could have hung pretty shelves and set potted plants between the home décor magazines and the university bulletins. I could have designed labels with red and blue and green Garamond font and created an archive for our descendants.

At the bottom of the refuse bin, the magazines are rubbish.

Catalogued and curated, they would have been a mini-reference library of family periodicals. 

■■■

I drag up a heavy wooden-framed standing easel from the basement and out onto my front porch where I slap at it, with a rag, brushing off spider webs and dust. Sarah said I could give it away. With a wet cloth, I wipe down the blackboard, on one side and, less effectively, the dry-erase board on the other side. As a kid, my artsy daughter had painted on paper clipped to the dry-erase face, so she left behind indelible swaths of primary colors. The easel was a sturdy piece of playroom equipment though. Would be handy for an after-school community center. I manhandled it into the garage and opened the garage door, ready to load it into my trunk. Sunshine fell on the thing and illuminated the vertical letters down the lower left-hand leg below the blackboard, drawn in turquoise paint.

I LOVE TO DO ART

Oh, Sarah. I’ll have to keep it now.

■■■

Guy Clark invites us to notice the little things in a song he wrote a long time ago, and Lyle Lovett gave the tune life, many times over. “Step inside this house,” Lyle sings, pointing out the picture on the wall “painted by a friend . . . it doesn’t look like much I guess but it’s all that’s left of him.” On he goes, sweetly, reverently, gesturing to his treasures—a poetry book, a gift from a girl; a piece of glass which casts a rainbow; a guitar from an old man; and his boots and vest and jacket and leather bag and his “hat hangin’ on the wall.” Ordinary things belonging to him. Which is the entire point, of course. Life is made of the ordinary stuff endowed with meaning. When Lyle sings the song, it hurts to listen.

■■■

In my parents’ house, I found a heavy scrapbook Mom made, documenting my wedding preparations, thirty-five years ago. Her handwritten notes, both wry and sweet, in ink.

There’s the receipt for the groom’s wedding ring: $121.22.

There’s my signature, forged by Mom, on the venue agreement. 

I’d never seen the scrapbook before, never knew of its existence. But here it was, in my lap, in the den where I grew up, in the house my parents have owned since 1967. I gasped. “Mom, you did this?” But Mom doesn’t know, can’t remember anymore, and she looked, wide-eyed, back at me. “I did?” was what her face said.

I turned the pages and read bits aloud, conjuring new images of Mom bending over the oval dining room table, scissors in hand, trimming edges, collating her own experiences into a paper documentary of the months leading up to the wedding of her firstborn. My librarian Mom, careful to include the “will not attend” cards, thoughtful with her neat penmanship, preserving on paper what she will one day forget. 

I think of some notepad pages found, earlier, amongst the junk mail, like a stray diary entry, intimate and fragile. Mom had written seven almost-identical sentences, like a mantra: “Now tonight I have somehow come to believe I will always remember tonight and what it means to me . . .” Minor differences between the lines, her plea to not forget, penned so carefully, like a prayer, ending with, “So as I leave this place where I now find myself, I do still believe I will always remember this night.”

She’d known, then, what was coming, what was leaving.

Wedding scrapbook still open, I looked up at Mom and at Dad and at my sister, Amy.

“Can I have this?” I asked them, the people of the house.

“Is it mine?” I asked the room. ■