What We Keep

From her perch on the dusty mantel of what was my parents’ house, she meets my gaze with an expression of curiosity. Her face is round and full. Her legs, already long for her age, are stacked rolls of baby fat.  Her eyes are large and clear. The cream and sepia tones of the photograph mask their color, but I know those eyes.  They are pale green, the color of a peridot.

She is standing, leaning against the back cushions of a dark brocade sofa.  There is another photo memorializing the moment in which her grandmother is hovering at the edge of the frame, alert to the inevitable moment when her first granddaughter’s still soft and cartilaginous kneecaps will fold and send her tumbling.  

The photo is secured onto a metal base which also displays a pair of bronzed baby shoes – my baby shoes – delicately hand-stitched out of heavy white satin by my mother.  I do not remember where these shoes and those of my brother were displayed in the house in which we grew up, but when we moved to the farm, into a house with a fireplace, they were placed on either end of the mantel and there they stayed, becoming – like so many things do when they sit somewhere long enough – invisible.  

Now, though, as we empty the house of its possessions, they are anything but invisible.  The toddlers that my brother and I once were stand like benevolent guards over the disassembling of the lives that called it home for 50 years.  They, who have not yet experienced loss and disappointment and heartbreak, oversee our feeble efforts to answer one of life’s great existential questions: What to throw away and what to keep?

I used to be excessively sentimental.  I saved everything.  There are boxes in the attic at Sandhill that contain years and years of birthday cards and Christmas cards and journals.  I still have the wall calendar from my freshman year in college, along with the course catalog and the class directory.  I have the trophy I received in 1967 when I was elected Miss Youth Camp.  It is probably in the same box as my Girl Scout badge sash.

I had the first pre-school art project (a potato print) that my nephew declared he had made just for me professionally framed and the little Lane cedar chest that all the girls got as seniors in high school still holds, among other treasures, the rewards I received for memorizing the Beatitudes and books of the Bible in elementary school.

A lot of life has been lived since the key to the 1967 Pontiac Tempest dangled from my keychain, since the gold satin honor graduate stole hung around my neck, since small objects like programs and matchbooks and menus were talismans, the mere touching of which had the power to make me hopeful.  I am no longer that sentimental and, as I sift through the composition books in which my father made notes for Sunday School and the Simplicity dress patterns that my mother kept long after she stopped making my pleated skirts, I cannot help wondering what I thought I was accomplishing by holding on to all that paper and fabric and metal.  

She is still looking at me, the baby on the mantel, her expression no longer one of curiosity, but, instead, tenderness and encouragement and love.  “You know what to keep,” she whispers.  And I realize that I do, that I always have.

Keep the pride of accomplishment, throw away the certificate.  Keep the satisfaction of achievement, throw away the plaque.  Keep the gratification of investment in people and ideas, throw away the need for any recognition beyond the joy of participation.

“I will not, though,” I whisper back, “throw away you.”

And in the angled autumn light I could almost swear that she gives me a wink with her peridot eyes.

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