Worldly Goods

We wandered into the recently vacated house of our elderly friend Jean. She and her husband moved here sixty years ago, raised a family, were a part of the community, and grew old. Now widowed, she has moved to a senior living facility, and the house will be put up for rent. Rugs are rolled up, furniture pushed aside, and miscellaneous possessions are heaped in various provinces throughout. There are definable sections for china, books, and cleaning supplies, but miscellany is the prevalent category by far.

The house was built in 1928, and Jean and her husband loved it the moment they saw it. She once told me, in fact, that even decades later, while walking home, she would often look across the street and say to herself, with wonder and satisfaction: “That’s my house. That beautiful house is my house.”

It’s a stately corner house with arched windows, a Spanish tile roof, good bones, and surprising spaces. A small bathroom is illuminated by vintage 1960s wallpaper in an outrageous floral pattern of orange, yellow, and chartreuse that proclaims itself repeatedly in mirrors. A crystal chandelier is suspended from a ceiling that is painted with sky and clouds. But when my friends and I entered, the late morning sun through the window panes in the front parlor was casting rectangles of light upon a bare wood floor, and I admit I felt loneliness, a sense of an ending. Framed pictures had been removed from the walls and stacked upon a couch. Shadows of leaves on a branch outside were trembling. It would have been easy to feel sad.

But this is the way of things, and we are of the moment. Instead of getting mired in poignancy, Vickie invites Cornelia and me to take some objects from the piles. In truth, we need nothing, but we warm up to the experience, exploring and fondling, and we’re surprised by our own absurd acquisitiveness. Cornelia finds a box of buttons, thread, and sewing supplies, which she deems useful and desirable, and I promptly clutch a string of faux pearls and a pocket knife, and we laugh at how we never entirely shed our origins, for could our chosen loot better symbolize a girl from postwar Europe and one from 1950s Brooklyn? I think not.

There are colorful glass bottles lined up on the window sill, and a sturdy old mixer on top of the fridge, and a lifetime accumulation of cookware and utensils. Oh, the stuff we amass! (I have a moment of anxiety, as I often do, thinking about what my daughter will have to sort through someday, although Monte is pretty good at culling things along the way.) Now I am touched by the sight of tiny booklets of simple songs and sheet music on a tray beside some woodwind instruments, and I ask Cornelia if she can read the music. “Of course,” she says, and she puts a recorder to her lips and plays a snippet, soft and haunting.

There was happiness in this house, a kind of contentment that might have risen to the painted clouds or been absorbed into the luminous wallpaper. It may be a dormant dominion of stuff right now, awaiting its destiny, but it doesn’t take too much imagination to sense the life within and the echoes of the voices it held.

I am braced for my own such parting soon. I hope I will have the grace and strength to be grateful for the years we have had in our home, and vicariously glad for the new occupants.

Outside, fruit is dropping from citrus trees, paint is peeling from a fence, and the flowers have faded, but my friends and I walk along the bright streets laughing, because this is the way of things, and the stories will continue.