I dragged my dead mother’s bed around for over 30 years. Her dresser, too. Both antiques. Both solid wood, the color of honey.
The dresser handles carved like grape leaves. The bed with four posters and an embellishment on each end shaped like a rolling pin. My mother leans against that headboard nursing me in a photo, faded with curled edges. She looks at the camera with a resigned expression, her chin down but eyes up, my hand playing with her blouse. I was her fifth and last. She must have been tired.
I slept in the bed later as a teenager, a beautiful piece of well-crafted furniture out of place in my narrow bedroom, first door on the left in our 14x80 trailer hallway. The last person to sleep in it was my son Seth, I think. Until during one move somewhere along the way after Will and I got married and I lost the frame and slats.
In 1974, my mother had nothing valuable to leave behind. Except for beautiful furniture, some silver, and well-made clothes. We each got a dresser, my three sisters and me. My brother didn’t really care that there wasn’t one left over for him. We also split her silver and crystal, cigarette snuffers and embossed studio photographs, my debutant mother a bride in white, shining on a velvet sofa. Visual evidence of her once-privileged life. I got the bed, a dresser and her green leather jacket with a satin lining. Hanging right now in my foyer. Smelling of her. Smelling of Missouri and Colorado and California. Of Aspen, Grand Junction, Boulder, and Durango. Of four children and three husbands. Of the other two men who came later. Of books and skis and misogyny and snow.
.
Letting go of these objects was easier than I thought. Maybe because I kept them for so long. Maybe because as I get older, I realize the stories embodied in them have meaning for me but won’t for my children: neither of them ever met my mother. She is more abstract to them than she is to me. Like a letter viewed on an optometrist’s wall through multiple lenses, unreadable, blurry and small. I’m also terrified of hoarding: I don’t want to posthumously burden my family with a bunch of useless-to-them detritus.
To be fair, I didn’t release all of the dresser. I kept the drawers and the top and a corner and the mirror frame. To repurpose into new furniture later. But it makes me think about objects and things and the stories they tell and the meaning those stories impart. Her dresser, in particular. When a loved one leaves your world, the objects they leave behind are all you have left. If I had the right tools, I imagine I could gather her DNA samples from that jacket still, 50 years later.
Will has a dresser he’s been hauling around, too. Since 1998, seven years after his father died. It was in his father’s dressing room / study on the east end of his childhood house in Maryland, above the covered porch where his parents used to have dinner parties. Overlooking the lawn where his sister had a mental break. I asked Will to list three things his dresser represents, the three broader stories it tells. He told me this:
My father worried constantly about money and this dresser was where he put his wallet every night. Apt, as a wallet is a perpetual symbol of money.
There was a certain orderliness to my father’s room and this dresser was part of that. I guess it was his way of teaching a lesson in how a man should organize things and how to show respect for a wife and mother. As opposed to the other parts of his home life as a gentlemen farmer. He had a work shed on the first floor of the well house that wasn’t as tidy: perhaps the place where he felt most authentic. As a boarder at Gilman (the private boy’s school where Will, his father, and other male relatives went) he learned about order and how to keep his personal possessions in a neat fashion.
This dresser makes me think of the southern Gothic side of my family and Maryland’s Eastern Shore: it makes me think about the people who stood in front of it, my other ancestors. The side of my family that said “don’t let colored people sleep in it”, referring to a bed that was given by my paternal grandmother to my mom right after she married my dad.
And now, dog patina. One of our beloved Weimaraners – our second one, Mies – chewed a corner of one of the drawers, now gnawed and raw. Which is why our objects mean so much to us: they embody pieces, marks, fragments, stories. The person who left them the protagonist, the object itself a stage on which our loved one lived and danced (and in the case of an anxious dog, chewed). Where they started preparations for the day, pulling out underwear and socks, t-shirts and pants. Where they stashed love letters and hid jewelry, a necklace hidden in the furthest reaches of the second drawer from the bottom. An engagement scroll hidden in the drawer above that. Spritzed themselves with bottles of perfume set on top, their fingerprints and DNA left all over.
But I gave them away. To a young entrepreneur with a warehouse space in Ballard, where he refurbishes old furniture and then sells it on Instagram under the handle “@stuffinseattle”.
“Are you okay if I disassemble it and use it in pieces?” he asked.
“Yes.” I said. “As long as you make something beautiful for someone else to cherish.”
Three decades was long enough. I don’t need stuff with my mother’s DNA all over it anymore. Because it’s in me. Has been. Always, of course. I am my mother’s DNA. A living heirloom of flesh and blood.
Things That Nourished My Writing: June - November 2023
FOOD
Bread. Which I started making again now that we’re in the new house.
Crispy chickpeas. THE BEST.
LITERARY
The Lemon Tree by Sandy Tolan.
MUSIC
The Billie Eilish: Chill playlist from Apple Music.
Anoushka Shankar (who we saw live at the Moore Theatre this fall).
PLACES
Beach house sitting at Naketa Beach.
Vancouver, British Columbia (Bria’s first international trip).
Burnaby Lake (where I raced a single for the first time ever).
OTHER RESOURCES
What Objects Tell the Story of Your Life