like a nuisance, he was everywhere, dressed in everyone's clothes, smiling behind everyone's eyes, lingering in small comments {gosh, we're seventy now, i wonder how many more of these there will be for us}, and ambushing me in jokes {you know when you turn 30 this year you'll be closer to 60 than to birth}.
he was telling me the same story with different words: the mortality of bodies and the mortality of things.
my great-aunt's family included us mikesell's {her brother's family} as they said goodbye to their lake house and more importantly to the bigger life she used to lead before she had a stroke this spring. but the sadness, the bitter in the parting mixing with the sweetness of all the memories, it wasn't a pall over the time, merely a depth to it, a call to reality. their own. hers. mine.
my great aunt's possessions were distributed: her travel memorabilia, jewelry, photos, knick knacks, china, silver, and the mundane – old playing cards, speakers, sewing basket. it was heartbreaking to watch as the connection between her and her things was pulled until thin and then softly broken to give them a new life, new meaning and a new home with one of the forty-five family members there. and even though reason {because she's sharp and together despite her age, 91, and her post-stroke body} has told her these things need to go, that she can't take them with her, it was hard to watch, hard to ask for this thing or that thing even though it would otherwise go to goodwill after tomorrow. hard knowing what it cost her, even amidst her never ending good cheer.
but these things we all carried away in the back of cars, onto planes, across countries, they carry with them the lingering residue of that sweet spirit of hers ensuring their destiny to be loved. though one day too soon, even if we are lucky enough to follow the mikesell way and live into our nineties*, the best these things can hope for is to be passed through weathered hands, onto the next generation. a little older, more love-worn and tired, but optimistic for their next life.
after all the work the family did over multiple visits and from both sides of the family, there was still a house full of things, possessions, sundries, and food. it was overwhelming. it was exhaustive. and i come home, to my home, so lovingly inhabited, lovingly designed, find it's also filled with things, even more than when i left for virginia, and yet there is a lot i want to clear out, let go of, pare down. limit myself so that the patina of my love and care is not spread too thin over too many objects, that it can steep into those pieces of true resonance, those possessions that somehow seem to make manifest a part of my spirit you wouldn't see otherwise. like the set of scales i inherited from grandpa, the antique ivory bracelet i have instantly fallen in love with from my great-aunt, my installation of birds i have yet to hang here at my new place, my jade tree that will one day be massive.
so i call do is begin the purge. that bottle of conditioner i'll never use, the shirt that has a small hole in it that i didn't like wearing much lately anyway, the wine glasses left from a mis-matched set, the vases i always thought weren't quite pretty enough. and as i struggle with the typical decade-turning questions of what am i doing with my life? and how can i get where i want to go fast enough? i can at least feel like my physical life, of my house and body, will be in tidy and in shape coming into this new year.
so here we go, starting now.
*even our descendants in the 18th and early 19th centuries lived into their nineties.
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a little self-reflective self-portrait shoot from the end of the dock at the lake house just after my final swim in smith mountain lake.
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