Memory Vaults: What to do with the minutia of our lives in Daydreaming on the Porch

When Julia Ridley Smith’s parents died, they left behind a virtual museum of furniture, books, art, and artifacts. Between the contents of their home, the stock from their North Carolina antiques shop, and the ephemera of two lives lived, Smith faced a monumental task. What would she do with her parents’ possessions?

From the book blurb for
“The Sum of Trifles”
By Julia Ridley Smith

This was the arduous task my siblings and I faced when our mother died in January 2020, just months before the start of the Covid pandemic. I had been living in her large house downtown for ten years as she declined with dementia and had been her full time caregiver. All thought of selling the house and dealing with the huge trove of porcelain, China, silverware, antique framed prints and many beautiful pieces of 18th and 19th century furniture, was put on hold. Mom had a lot of beautiful things and it would be very painful to go through them and decide what to keep and what to give away, dispose of, or sell at the estate sale held in the Spring of 2022.

My mother was very different from me insofar as her own belongings, treasures and keepsakes, apart from the antiques and silverware. She didn’t have but a few books, and collectible kitsch such as I love to find at Goodwiill and flea markets,didn’t interest her.

But the “things” she did have were precious to me since I lived with her so long taking care of all ger daily living and financial needs. My sister and I ended up packing a lot of her China antiques and little things we knew she loved and putting them in the storage unit I rented. We sold a lot at the estate sale, but I chose beforehand a number of keepsakes that were hers to remember her by, as well as some of her clothes; her stuffed animals, which were very dear to her in her last years; and the collection of Mother’s Day cards I had given to her and which she saved in the cabinet next to her bed. There are other little mementoes I saved as well.

By contrast, as we started emptying her house, I had to move all of my hundreds of books and all the photographs I had matted and framed over the years, and which hung in all the walls upstairs, plus countless personal treasures and artifacts that I simply could not throw out. At least not then, and two years later, not now.

All these things included many souvenirs from all my travels around the country, grad school papers to which I had devoted a huge chunk of my early intellectual life, letters, postcards, and “trinkets,” for lack of a better word.

It’s only been during the last 25 years that I’ve even had the means to buy things I wanted, mainly books, but many other things I had never even considered acquiring because they had always been outside my limited budgets. Now I have a small apartment with much of those books and artifacts stuffed into every available corner and space. It’s insulting to call it clutter because I greatly value these things and, unapologetically, cannot imagine parting with most of it.

Julia Smith recently had published a wise book of essays, “The Sum of Trifles,” in which she attempts to “peel back” the layers of meaning surrounding specific objects her parents owned. I am starting to do the same now as I catalog the contents of various boxes of my own keepsakes and memorabilia. In addition to countless photographs and extensive online journal writings, which span decades and which I have had photocopied and bound, all this precious and revealing memorabilia tell in minute detail many little stories of what now seems like a long life. I hope some of this will be preserved and cared for by family members and new generations. I have no children myself, and thus feel this huge effort to catalog valuable keepsakes is the only way I will be remembered, many years hence, if this living wish should come true. It may not. I could be deluding myself as to my own importance to future generations. I’m not a notable person. I could be forgotten, as children are the closest of blood kin, in addition to siblings, and with no immediate family, this could be a fool’s errand. So be it.

Ten years in one place and the bits and pieces of a life really accumulate. I have reached a point of satiety, as comfortable as I am surrounded by all my stacks of books and overflowing bookshelves. I need to at least start to take inventory of what to part with, keep here with me, or put in storage. I can feel the boxes and boxes of “stuff” become a mental and emotional liability because I don’t even know what’s in them yet I keep them for some good reason. To me, anyway. But when I do look those stores boxes of memorabilia, I am surprised and delighted by what I find, mostly.

The flotsam and jetsam of many years are hidden in those boxes, some with lids on, some open. I truly realize I need to free up space on my shelves for books that I treasure most and know I want to keep. But it is so difficult to choose. Since I am a compulsive book buyer — new and used — there is no giving it up altogether. I like to know books are there, unread repositories of knowledge, deep thought, humor, lives lived, science explored, pasts recalled, society documented in photographs. All this wealth of knowledge, and yet I know I can never read or know but a fraction of what is there. It’s easier to sit on the sofa inhabiting the internet and wiling away the hours, my iPhone the modern-day multimedia, entertainment and communication device/drug that cradles me in it’s cocoon and shuts out the immediate world in favor of one lived in cyberspace, as we used to call it.

But leaving “cyberspace” I am confronted everywhere in my immediate, two-room physical environment with the saved objects that, daily over the years, have accumulated, and which, upon inspection with the half-hearted intent to get rid of, remind me of the life I have lived. These include the tiniest and most concrete souvenirs and valued papers, clippings, photos, knickknacks, keepsakes and “objects” which for one reason or another have lasted and endured, even if I have not looked at or thought about them in years.

Still, like the unread books in piles overflowing on the floor in front of the full bookshelves, these “documents” and objects form the patchwork quilt that is the continuing narrative of my life. I discard these things at some level of psychic peril, with regret, and with the pain of loss, but with resignation knowing that once I have looked them over and decided what to throw away, there is no going back. Small parts of me are gone forever.

That is the reason the sudden loss of all one’s precious keepsakes in a hurricane, tornado, flood or fire is so devastating. Not just photo albums are gone, but a lifetime of memories called to mind by the simple, ordinary things we acquire and hesitate to part with, and which help us know who we are now, in the present, and could enable others in the future to know us. They are part of our identity, our sense of self. These “things” are emphatically not “clutter” or “junk.” There may be way too much of it. There may be some psychological issues at play here. But as long as yourself and no one else else sees or is bothered by it, and there are no health or safety problems, I say to those who might shake their heads and look askance “let it be.”

I don’t ever intend for wherever I live to become dangerous and unhealthy. And I still have the presence of mind to know when enough is finally enough. I’m 73 now, and can still find my way around my place, though it may seem like a labyrinth or worse to the stranger or the uninitiated. But I never have company, and I never entertain in my place. I never will. I like my life the way it is now.

And to those who say get rid of everything you don’t “need” before you die, or “I don’t want to be a burden on my children,” well, I don’t have any children and it will fall on my brother and sister, if they likely survive me, and to them I say “Take some money from my will after taking whatever keepsakes you want, kindly give my books to the public library, and then contact the “junk” haulers to cart everything else away to the landfill. I’ll be gone and it will be just “junk” to anyone but me.

I share with you now just one tiny corner of this world of objects, papers and books that I am surrounded by, in this instance the contents of one of those standard-sized banker’s storage boxes. I’ve used them for decades in all my many moves.

Memory Vault, Vol. 1

1. A blue Morpho butterfly on a blank note card. For years I’ve been entranced and spellbound by butterflies, those exquisitely beautiful creatures that are so elusive when I try to photograph them. The Blue Moroho has perhaps the most gorgeous wings of all, and I have two treasured framed and mounted morphos, objects I most certainly want to hold onto until the end.

2. Box with some of my favorite Christmas cards. Every year I buy a box of Christmas card and send out maybe half a dozen. It’s a lost art now, but there are still a lot of us older folks who mail them to our closest friends, and other very special people. It’s the only way I ever hear from some of them that I’ve known for 40 or more years. I save some of them to remind me what I sent to friends on Christmases past. Can you even begin to imagine the internet generations sending out paper Christmas cards purchased at Hallmark or Barnes & Noble, or even bought online Amazon, though that would degrade the experience a bit as opposed to going to a store to buy the cards.

3. One of my photos of a landscape with Camellias. I go back and forth about what my favorite flower is: camellia? azalea? iris? zinnia? But all things considered, I’m going to go with camellias, the winter-blooming flowers that delight and cheer me up during the cold months with short days and limited sunlight.

4. A beautiful fall landscape scene that I mounted on cardboard. I do this with a lot with photos taken from the many magazines I subscribe to, and which I think are memorable in many subtle ways.

5. A photo from “Blue Ridge Magazine” showing Overall Run Falls. Waterfalls are to me, as are sunrises and sunsets,among Nature’s most sublime and beautiful gifts. It’s been years since I’ve seen one, but I have a lot of travel memories and photos taken when I was younger and could navigate the sometimes difficult trails for the best views of waterfalls I research and greatly anticipated seeing some day. https://images.app.goo.gl/YLcCENmM8Q77pTgC8

6. Illustration of an old-fashioned roll-top desk. Ever since I can remember, from first seeing photos in magazines, and later in antique shops, roll-top desks have deeply and nostalgically appealed to me as the perfect old-fashioned piece of furniture, filled with cubbyholes for letters and keepsakes.
   

7. Photo of the church bell from England that my aunt gave to her sister’s church, in memory of her.
   
8. Matted photo of the John Day River in the Oregon high desert, taken on a road trip in 1992. This is one of my all-time favorite rivers. So beautiful and enchanting,as all desert and canyon rivers are.
   
9. Photo of a small North Carolina waterfall. I have lots of such photos scattered around in various boxes and albums. I would actually rather visit a very small waterfall that I discover serendipitously while driving along g mountain roads than the might and famous falls like Niagara.
   
10. Three-day detailed travel journal from April 12-15, 1984 recording and commenting on all the places I stopped to visit on a leisurely road trip from South Carolina to New Orleans. This was the initial leg of what was to become my first, much longer, solo road trip across the country from New Orleans to Seattle.
    
11. A 1959 South Carolina official highway road map. This is the type of road map I loved to pick up at Gulf, Esso and Texaco filling stations during family vacation trips by car in the 1950s and ‘60s across the lower tier of Southern states on our way from New Orleans to South Carolina. Such fun for a boy who had seemingly infinite curiosity about all the map details, including small towns we passed through and their populations.
    
    (To be continued)

For further reference:

“The Stories We Leave Behind: A Legacy-Based Approach to Dealing With Stuff” by Laura H. Gilbert
https://a.co/d/0izXdSQp

“The Sum of Trifles” (Crux: The Georgia Series in Literary Nonfiction Ser.)
https://a.co/d/04l2WBcv

“The Meaning of Things: Domestic Symbols and the Self”
https://a.co/d/08WTq7jZ

“What We Keep: 150 People Share the One Object that Brings Them Joy, Magic, and Meaning”
https://a.co/d/0fw86l1Q

Last updated July 14, 2024