Clearing out Memory Lane

More than 700 miles from my house, I have a storage unit full of stuff.  Most of it belonged to my mother when she died.  Quite a lot of it belonged to me, but was in storage at my mom’s house while I was away at college.  Some of it is even from college.

I avoided my storage unit for months, simply because I couldn’t face sorting through my late mother’s things.  I knew there were things I desperately wanted to keep, like her cookbooks.  But what about the things I didn’t want to keep?  What about her clothes?  I couldn’t get rid of her clothes, could I?  What if I didn’t want to keep things that she loved?  I couldn’t just give those things away, could I?

So I did the mature thing: I avoided the whole thing.

About a month before I moved out of the country, I decided I’d better get things sorted out.  And then my husband-to-be listened quietly on the phone as I sobbed about taking my mother’s clothes, things she loved and wore and still kind of smelled like her, to the charity shop.  When I paused to take a breath, he said, “You don’t have to do this right now.  Just keep it.  We can sort through it all later.”

Almost nine years later, I’m about halfway through the “stuff”.  I visit family up north about twice a year now that we’re back in the country, and I make a trip to the storage place each time.  I can only fit a few things in my car to bring back each time, so the process is slow.  As time passes, it is easier to approach the stuff with a clear head.  It is easier to admit that I do not love everything she loved, and to understand that not loving some of those things does not somehow diminish the great love and affection I have for her.  That has been a difficult lesson for me.

But then there are the treasures.

Like those cookbooks that sat on her cookbook rack for as long as I can remember.   Thumbing through them now, I am 7 years old all over again, desperate to make a batch of cookies from the Betty Crocker cookbook.  (And treasure within a treasure: an index card fell out of one of the cookbooks.  I picked up the card and found, written in my grandmother’s perfect cursive, the recipe for my grandma’s haystack cookies.)

Or the framed bluebird needlepoint that took her about three years to complete, because she found it so frustrating.  It hung in her kitchen after she bought her very own little house, and she decorated the whole kitchen around it – even though the little needlepoint really never was quite right.

Or the stainless steel pots she gave me when I moved into my very first apartment.  I mostly used them for noodle packets, but I remember my first attempt at Mom’s fantastic potato soup in that soup pot.  (I called my mom every 5 minutes, saying, “Now what do I put in?”)

These days, I have really nice stainless steel cookware, a KitchenAid mixer (with a spanky new ice cream maker attachment – yay for Mother’s Day!), and more kitchen tools than that noodle-packet-eating 20-year-old me could have ever imagined.  But last night I made a red sauce in one of those old pots, and it really did make me smile.

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