Member-only story
If She Can Let Go, So Can I
I purged Mom’s house of chaos and found my inner calm
Buried deep in a box full of stuff located in my mother’s garage, I find a fragile hourglass, filled with shimmery aqua-colored sand. No framework protects its delicate structure. I flip it over and watch the sand form a crumbly pyramid in the bottom globe.
This gets placed in the tub of things I want to keep.
My mom invited me over to clean out her home and garage, so I'm here to climb the mountains of clothes and shoes, topple boxes, and recreate some semblance of order from the current state of chaos.
Little did I know that purging a lifetime of my mother’s material things would lead to creating my very own clean slate.
During this project I find a total of 27 wristwatches of various age, style, color, brand, and function. I speculate about how she had trouble adjusting from the hourglass to modern technology.
There are a total of six decorative sundials. A few compasses. Twelve gazing balls, yet none of them were found together. It's as if she bought one, put it away, it became buried, she couldn’t find it, so she bought another one. Over and over again.
Five clock radios. Two of which I bought for her over the years, when she told me she needed one. I assumed the second one was for a different room. I didn’t know they were being discarded in her infinite slush pile.
Every carton I open is physical evidence of things I knew about my mother but had somehow forgotten. Her enthusiasm for new trends: tubs and totes crammed full of cassette tapes. More just like those, but with CDs. VHS tapes overflowing from cardboard crates. Her love for costumes and holiday decor tucked here, there, and everywhere.
Her passion to learn new things: unopened packages of art supplies and how-to books, still pristine in plastic shrink wrap. An armoire with doors tied shut, the contents bulging inside.
Tubs bursting with hundreds of loose photos and albums, every page full. One of them is dedicated to three decades…
