Stuff Mom Kept

My mom was the most organized person--if not in the world, at least in the greater-St Louis metro area. I say "was" not because she's no longer with us, but because she has precious little to organize these days as she sinks further into dementia. When it came time to clear out her house and put it on the market, I tasked myself with going through 40 years of accumulation and sorting it out into piles for my siblings, piles for Good Will and piles for Mr. Trashman.

Walking through her house, one would never ever in a million years guess that she was a pack rat. Her house was as far from one of those fascinating specimens profiled on "The Hoarder" TV show....you know....the ones with little narrow pathways snaking through all the rooms...where people sleep on portions of the bed because the rest if full of, well, stuff. No, Mom's house was clean and organized. You didn't get to the stuff until you began to open drawers and cabinets - all neatly organized, mind you, but full.

Various hardy friends helped me with the task of sorting through everything, room by room. Amazingly, none seemed too put off by the accumulation. Aside from the mice detritus and one mouse mummy, the stuff was clean.

On Mom's closet shelf I found pieces of hangars. She had those plastic kind with the swivel hooks. I am sure they could have been fixed, but certainly could have been replaced more quickly and economically than the time and effort it would take to repair them.

Carefully wrapped in boxes labeled "broken cut glass bowl" and "broken ornament" and "broken Hummel" were....broken items. As she had plenty of intact bowls, ornaments and Hummels, these items went to Mr. Trashman.

One of my favorite finds was a drawer full of shoulder pads removed from blouses and sweaters. Mom apparently thought her shoulders were just fine without them, but could not bear to throw them away.

Sorting through the boxes of greeting cards and correspondence was the most time consuming and heart-wrenching. Taking the time to do it, however, gave me a glimpse into lives I had long forgotten. I never knew that Mom's best friend, Betty Fox, had a baby that only lived 12 hours. Or that Mom's miscarriage was between Glenn and Anne, not Ned and Glenn. I found a letter Dad had written to his best friend, Gus, right after the drunk driver hit our house and sent him into congestive heart failure. It happened when my first son was an infant. It was full of his typical humor, bragging that Ryan (my son) was already having to carry a baseball bat around to keep the girls off and that his (Dad's) arm was still in a sling from where Mom grabbed him and pushed him down the stairs at the hospital so she'd be the first one to hold baby Ryan, not him. I sent the letter to Gus. What a blast from the past to get a letter from your friend that died 20 years ago...

Ah, but lest I fall into melancholy, let's return to Mom's stuff.

As the oldest niece and the caretaker of her elderly spinster aunts, Mom inherited photos. Boxes of them. BIG boxes of them. And slides. LOTS of slides. I sent many of those out to her cousins found on Facebook, and have reconnected with some interesting people and through them have discovered that my great-aunts (three of those unmarried spinsters) had a wild side I never suspected.

And Uniforms!!! She must have thought we'd need them again... In a wooden trunk my dad made were our grade school and high school uniforms, team uniforms, team jackets and yes, even Glenn's McDonalds uniform.

Baby quilts....baby clothes handmade by my Grandmother....little miniature aprons Marian and I wore when we helped maked "pie" (pie crust sprinkled with cinamon and sugar)...Mom's wedding dress (moth eaten and stained), those awful matching green velvet dresses made from one of the bridesmaid dresses from my Mom's wedding for Marian and me (the ones with the terrible scratchy collars), Dad's briefcase (with some cross country team photos in it that had never been delivered to the guys' who ordered them)...

Worst of all were the many items packed away, carefully labeled with the date received and the giver's name. Christmas presents, birthday presents, little knick-knacks, decorative items. Things she didn't need but stored (neatly) nonetheless.

My trip through memory lane took four nearly five months.

I've been going through my own stuff ever since. I am 95% certain my own kids will never take that time to do it, so I may as well relive the memories now.