Sometimes it’s the things we throw away because we think they have lost their use, or their value that we wake up one day longing to have back in our lives.
My mother loves a clean and tidy house, passing down her know how of floor cleaning, laundry sorting, and other domestic duties to me, her only daughter. Joy, it seemed, lived in my mothers countenance when she cleaned, spruced, and generally feathered her family’s nest.
I was a young woman growing up post Women’s Liberation in a Southern California suburb with my mom, a baby of the depression era and product of the 50’s. Yes, she worked outside her home at times, to help my dad pay the bills, but her real job, her dreams and aspirations, I believed were centered in her house and in us. She, I knew, valued every single thing in her house though at times she would get it in her to toss everything she owned into the dumpster and, like she said, “Start fresh!”.
Last Sunday, I was over at my mom’s house doing my weekly in-person check in on my parents. When it was time to leave, she pulled me aside and told me she wanted to give me something. I followed her to her bedroom where she slid the closet doors open, stooped down and lugged out her old typewriter. The very same typewriter she had had in high school and the same one I had used in high school and yes in college, before access to computers was the norm and paper and ink ribbons were thought as discards.
She set the typewriter down with a thud and then reached up and pulled down one of the yarn craft weavings her mother-in-law, my grandmother, had given her long ago. She put both items on her bed. The old heavy Royal Arrow typewriter with the bright pink yarn weaving on top sunk deep into the old mattress top.
“I got into one of my moods and went to cleaning and threw out lots of stuff. I wanted to be rid of everything,” she began. “My wedding pyrex, dishes, your grandmother’s crochet hooks, pictures. ” she let out a long sigh and looked down towards the floor of her bedroom. “Don’t say anything, Mona. I made a mistake. You take these. Hold them for me.”
In my twenties, I would have screamed at her for throwing out priceless family memories. In my thirties, I would have held my emotions in check and not spoken to her for weeks, simmering in my self-righteous exasperation of her sometimes unexplainable and utterly unreasonable ways. Now, in my very late forties, I was quiet in my sadness for her and for us. Neither stunned or baffled at my mother, any longer. Just a heavy and reluctant understanding of her as a person, not as my father’s wife or my own mother, just another aging woman, quite like myself.
Mom sat on the bed, on one side of her typewriter with her mother-in-law’s yarn weaving on top and I sat down on the other side. She held her hands in her lap, pink rosary beads around her neck, yellow bath robe wrapped around her. My forearm rested across the pink yarn weaving, playing with the pom on one end of the weaving. And we said nothing.
Miracles List : Week of Nov. 1, 2015
- I brought my mother’s typewriter and my grandmother’s yarn weaving home with me. Both are doing well in my studio, surrounded by other like minded wooly and creative sorts.
x-o,
Mona