Throwing the Rest of Mom Away
Photo Credit: Lucasfilm Ltd
It seems like an easy question to answer: my son asked me, "Are you keeping this, you know it's broken." He was referring to a candle-holder that we kept moving from one shelf in the garage to another until finally it broke.
Our home is a dynamic place; there are nine of us living here. Beds, chairs, couches, computers, coffee-makers, new things come in all the time. At Christmastime, Halloween, Thanksgiving, and Easter we dig out the appropriate holiday decorations and festoon the house outside and in. All this activity leads to a lot of thrashing of boxes among the shelves. Every summer we try to figure out what to keep in storage and what to throw away.
The next house we build, I will make sure there is an underground storage area similar in size and scope to the one seen at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark.
But I digress, let's get back to the broken candle holder. It was my mother's that she brought from the old country when we came to America in 1949. It was the only thing of hers I kept after she died.
I stored it in the garage because I abhor candles (see my articles on candles) and so have no use for a candle-holder. For all of my childhood this piece of porcelain was always in sight and amazingly stayed unbroken for more than 50 years - it was one of the few possessions she held onto. All the thousands of shoes and handbags she bought in America were not in her home when she died in 1999, see My Mother Loved Shoes.
I supposed it was time to just let it go and so I threw it away. That was last summer.
Today I was looking for a book in the garage which reminded me of what I did. Then I realized that I should have wrapped it better and said some words before dropping it unceremoniously into the garbage bin. It was the last thing I had of my mother's and now it feels as if I threw the rest of her away as well.
