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Not Every Question Has an Answer

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“If you could stay put, would you?”

No. Also, yes.

A friend, on a four-person Zoom call, asked the question as I cried my way through telling of my overwhelm cleaning out the family home I’m living in. Part of the reason I’m still here is because the task is not done. And maybe I’m dragging my feet, because it will be hard—and scary—to leave.

Last summer, at my 55th high school reunion, a classmate (a neighbor, living on the property where she grew up) asked if I like living here on the hill.

Yes. Also, no.

Some questions just don’t have simple answers. And here I am again, asking “what’s next” and “when.” I don’t know the answer to that, either. But every time we ask the questions, we get a little closer to answers.

It breaks my heart to think of this property, my family home for sixty-six years, belonging to strangers. And, I want to create another home while I’m relatively strong of mind and body. I love living among the trees; the view of sky, valley, mountain; the coyotes howling in the night. And, I’ve never aspired to take care of acres as my father dreamed, recreating his childhood farm life. Two weeks ago, I scraped and stomped down 197 mole volcanoes in the meadow ahead of the mowing appointment, a twice-monthly task until the grass stops growing for the season.

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I drove by a sweet house for sale in Olympia the other day. I would have liked to live in Olympia, in a home of my own again. But, I’ll be 74 this week; there is precious little time left to get established closer to the younger generations of my family in Seattle (grateful that I have younger generations). There’s no longer time for intermediate moves. Sand is quickly passing through the narrow neck of the hour glass. I was a little wistful—Olympia is closer to my hiking life, and my sisters.

What if I’d left here right after my mother died, eight years ago? How would my life be different now? No answers.

A novel I enjoyed a few years ago, The Midnight Library (Matt Haig), explores lives the protagonist could have lived, but didn’t. It’s intriguing to consider life’s twists and turns, paths chosen, trails not taken. “Two roads diverged in a yellow wood. . .” Or, perhaps, it wasn’t a choice, but circumstances that set the future, as in the 1998 movie, Sliding Doors.

Last month, I traveled with my daughter’s family to Sisters, Oregon, for my grandson’s baseball tournament. The Airbnb was in a development with houses and townhomes, manicured grounds with a greenway running through. Olders and grandkids, parents and strollers, dogs on leashes and kids on bikes went by the patio where I sat reading. I walked to the coffee shop in the mornings, bouncing with chatting olders when it opened at 6am. That’s what I want next on this aging journey: connection. No need for manicured lawns, but also not with an acre of mole tunnels.

Will I get to choose? No answer. I hope so. Tick tock.

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My sisters and I, trying to gather regularly to clean out the house, tackled the sewing and quilting supplies this month. Collecting needles from cabinets, drawers, shoeboxes, pincushions, sewing machine stools into a give-away box was like sifting stardust. My mother, my mother, my mother.

I sit on the deck and a pair of Anna’s hummingbirds hover around my head, on their way to and from the feeder, nearly empty again. I sense the presence of my parents. Are they here for me, or because this was their home? Will I leave them behind when I go? We’re here. We love you. Stardust.

We could hire someone to throw it all in a dumpster, but we would miss the stardust.

We put in the recycling box multiple sheets of paper on which our parents played Jotto—or Five-letter Word—on game sheets they created, and my mother’s lists of possibilities. Decades ago, they played it on trains and planes and at the dining room table. (Millennials did not invent Wordle, they merely wrote a computer program.) They kept the game sheets and lists, of course they did. Stardust. 

Last week, I gave 150 picture postcards from the desk drawer to a friend to send reunion reminders to her classmates. I’ve mailed two letters with decades-old, unused stamps from my mother’s obsessive saving. Slowly, surely. Repurpose, recycle, re-home. Get it out of here. So I can get out of here. When will that be? The third act comes with Social Security and Medicare (for now) and a lifetime national parks’ pass (mine has an image of wildflowers, thank goddess), but no crystal ball.

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If I could stay, would I? I do know the answer: No. That doesn’t mean it will be easy to leave. A friend says, what good is a life if we don’t miss the people and places that once inhabited it.

I would love to hear from you! What plans are you needing to get into place? What are your unanswerable questions? Leave a comment below.

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Buried Treasure

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Here in the Pacific Northwest the forsythia is blooming, swollen buds are bursting open, raspberry canes are sprouting new leaves. It’s also cold and rainy (except when it’s not), and the mountains are getting much-needed snow. Perfect weather for indoor projects. I have a growing list.

 

I’ve been looking for a stack of Little Golden Books I squirreled away in 2020, when clearing a bookshelf in preparation for hosting Family Pandemic School—The Shy Little Kitten, Scuffy the Tugboat, The Twelve Dancing Princesses. (Remember those days? Who would have thought times would get more “interesting” than that?) What I found instead, in the antique trunk my mother and I bought for five dollars at a yard sale nearly fifty years ago, were letters.

 

Finding letters in old trunks seems to be a thing with me. First was the Army footlocker, full of letters my parents wrote to each other during WWII. These are letters written to me—mostly by family—in the final third of the last century. Unlike my parents’ letters, I will not be transcribing and compiling these. But what to do with them? I really didn’t need another project.

 

My sisters and I are striving to get our family home ready to sell, so we aren’t caught flat-footed when opportunity knocks. But this is my stuff, not that of my parents. It’s somehow easier to hold, reminisce, and discard what our parents saved, which was everything.

 

I pulled out the letters, and decided I will leave the rest of the contents of the trunk intact for my children to discover when I’m gone—my high school scrapbook, magazines, my red-metal grade school lunch box. Who am I to decide what I leave behind is burden and what is of emotional value? Besides, why should they escape the left-behinds? Where I will put it when I move from this big house is mystery. Not knowing what to do with it all is probably why my parents never left home, held hostage by trash and treasure.

 

But the letters . . .

 

Unlike my mother’s neatly stacked and tied bundles, my musty missives were thrown willy-nilly into plastic grocery bags. I’ve put them in a plastic box to contain the smell. I do have a plan, which involves returning to my sisters letters they wrote; they’re about them, after all. But I can’t help reading them first, which takes time. They say something about who we were. I had forgotten how five-years-younger sister, Rebecca, sounded off to me about the unfairness of it all via the U.S.P.S. when she was left at home, absent her sisters, and long-distance calls were expensive. I recall my awe of five-years-older sister, Jo Ann, being off into the world on her own while I was in college. I’m glad to be reminded of our relationships.

 

The letters from my mother are revealing of who she was—and I won’t say more about that, other than I don’t misremember. More letters from my father than I thought he’d written. Postcards of Mount St. Helens before she blew her top. Crayon-scribbled “congratulations” cards from the children in my preschool class when my son was born, almost forty-seven years ago. Stunningly, their names call up many of the small faces and personalities. I’m not saving them, or the many greeting cards.

 

There are letters from my husband-to-be and from the early years of our marriage when he was out of town for an extended period. I don’t know if I’ll read those. It feels somehow intrusive after being unmarried for more than thirty years. I will return them to the trunk for our children. Just as I am grateful for the treasure of meeting my parents before I knew them, perhaps they will appreciate seeing theirs in a different light, before the end of our marriage blocked the lens of what came before. At any rate, it’s their history, and not mine to erase.

 

When we resize our lives (and don’t you love that word better than downsize?), we don’t need to put all of our past in the landfill. There is treasure amidst the trash. Sometimes it’s hard to know which is which. There are the two shoeboxes of postage stamps my mother kept, for example, thinking they would be valuable someday. They are not. Some will be set aside for a creative venture, many duplicates and tattered ones will go to the trash or be passed on to other creators, some will be saved for next gens—because relics of a time gone by are interesting, though they won’t realize that for many more years. Maybe it is our task to store the treasure for now. Sorting is another project.

 

P.S. I haven’t found the books.

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I would love to hear from you! What are your experiences of and philosophy about things left behind, yours and that of others? Leave a comment below.

A note about commenting on a post: Click the subscribe drop down arrow just above the comment section and provide your information (it’s private) to receive an email when someone replies to your comment. I, at least, will always reply!