What We Keep, What We Throw Away

What We Keep, What We Throw Away

            The rain began that Saturday morning and pounded Nashville all day.  It was a driving, insistent rain that drowned out thoughts of anything else, even before the local news preempted programming to report cars stranded on the interstates and residents trapped in their homes by rising waters.

            My daughter Caroline, with husband Luke, two-year-old Max, and Randolf, the Jack Russell, lived in a neighborhood bordered by a creek that at times rose and mimicked white rapids for a little while. But never had the creek jumped its banks. On this day, it did.

            One neighbor’s bridge had washed away, Caroline told me in her first call that afternoon. Another neighbor’s back yard was a lake, with water already seeping into the house.

            If only the rain would stop. Caroline and Luke could still see their yard. They could still drive out to the street. But the rain showed no sign of letting up.

            In a later call, Caroline was still trying to sound brave when she asked, “Can we come to your house? We don’t think it’s safe to stay here tonight.”

            Silly question. Of course they could come to my house.  Living on a high hill, I have my own issues with Mother Nature, but the rain was not a problem here.

            At dusk they arrived with a big suitcase, duffle bags, a couple of storage boxes, and Randolf’s carrier. They’d brought some clothes, files and important papers, their wedding album, Max’s photo albums, his inhaler, a few of his little cars, and one book - just one, grabbed on a whim.

            The unrelenting rain made a crushing noise, more menacing after dark. Throughout the long night and into the next day, the rain hammered the city. When it was all over, after more than twenty-four hours, eleven thousand houses were damaged. Caroline and Luke went back to their house to find that the flood waters had come in with a force that turned over their refrigerator, carried furniture into other rooms, and covered the floors with a glaze of sludge. The watermark on the walls was at four feet. 

            Caroline called, hoarse from crying. “Can we stay with you?” she asked.

            Another silly question.  Of course they could stay with me. Caroline was six months pregnant. I would do anything to ensure her well-being. There was no telling how long it would take to clean up and repair their property.

             That night we couldn’t think past the next morning: Begin the task of sorting through rubble.  

            Monday came, sunny and warm, a gorgeous day, as if Mother Nature were trying to make up for the havoc of the previous weekend. As Caroline and Luke and a brigade of helpers worked to empty their house, clean what could be cleaned and throw away the rest, I brought clothes home to wash. I will save their clothes: that was my mission.

            At the end of a fourteen-hour work day, Caroline and Luke arrived at my house, dirty and disheveled. They dumped piles of soggy, stinking towels and bed linens on the patio. They hauled in pictures from their walls. They brought some of Max’s stuffed animals that had watched the flood from high shelves. Max was with Luke’s parents for a few days. We wanted to spare him, but he’d been listening. He told his other grandmother, “My house flooded. My trucks got mud all over them.”

            A day into the process, Caroline and Luke were beginning to think past tomorrow. Though their mattress was ruined, they had salvaged their bed and a few other pieces of furniture. “Is it all right if we move into your guest room?” Luke asked.

            I had to think about this one.

            Caroline and Luke had been sleeping upstairs in what used to be Caroline’s room, but it was small, with all its original furniture. The guest room was downstairs, built some twenty years ago to accommodate aging grandparents. Much more spacious than my bedroom upstairs, it had a full bath, too. The furniture had gone to my daughters after their grandparents died, after my divorce, as the room was trying to decide what it would be in the new chapter of my life. A Murphy bed, one of those fold-up-into-the-closet beds, was hidden behind double doors.  

            But the room was full. Full of boxes, full of memories.

            I have become the memory-keeper in my family. Caroline and her sister, Dominique, grew up and moved out, leaving behind the relics of their childhood and teen years. We’ve tried cleaning out their bedrooms. “Throw it away,” they say, and I’m the one holding back the favorite toys. We’ve actually converted Dominique’s room to a baby’s room, and the closet is reasonably empty - except for those frilly Easter dresses and cheerleading uniforms.

            My ex-husband took his belongings, but I’ve kept handiwork and mementos from his mother. Hand-pieced quilts, embroidered tablecloths, a ceramic cookie jar. I want my daughters to have them someday, and I can’t see their dad hanging on to anything because of its sentimental value. No way he’d save that pig-in-a-bonnet cookie jar.

            My mother was a memory-keeper. When my brother died a few years ago and I cleaned out his house, I boxed up whatever I couldn’t bear to toss and took it to Mother’s house. She stored the items with keepsakes that reached all the way back to her parents’ lives. When she died and I emptied her little box of a house, I inherited what she could not throw away, and I could not throw it away either. So I packed up box after box and moved it to my house, to the guest room.

            Now, three years later, the stacks of boxes were still there.

            Of course I was willing to let Caroline and Luke move into that room. It was the logical place for them. Luke’s eleven-year-old son, Grant, would be with us half the time. He’d need Caroline’s room. “It may take a while to go through all those boxes,” I said. I don’t know what time frame I had in mind. I had worked on the boxes for three years.

            Luke’s dad had a truck. They would bring a load the next day. Luke and Caroline would need to buy a new mattress. I had a couple of days to clear out the guest room.

            The next morning, after I started the first load of laundry, I tackled the room.

            Every time I embarked on this task, I spent a while moving the boxes around, looking in them, taking things out and putting them back. Nothing I’d done had made much of a dent. On this morning, I knew I couldn’t quit in frustration. This time, I had to get everything out of the room. I started with toys from my childhood. A red telephone, partly rusted. Miniature dishes, probably painted with lead paint. I’d thought my grandchildren might like to see my toys, but now there was no time for that. I tossed everything that was not in great condition. Damaged “Little Golden” books that I had memorized long before I could read. I was glad to save one shoebox full of doll clothes, handmade by my mother, that needed only to be washed.

            Corsages from high school, long-dried flowers and faded ribbons filled a box. I’d once pinned them to my bulletin board with a note attached to each one telling who gave it to me and for what occasion. I read each notation, thought about those lanky boys that smelled like British Sterling and Juicy Fruit, and then I tossed the corsages.

            On to the salt and pepper shakers Mother collected. She rarely left the small town where she was born, but she loved to hear about her family’s travels. Would my daughters want these souvenirs? I couldn’t imagine that they would. But how could I send them to the Goodwill? I’d have to think of something. I put that box aside.

            Then there were the cards. Bundles tied with ribbons. I tossed them all.  More difficult, the letters. Some of them went back to the 1950’s, when Mother and my aunt exchanged letters every week. They lived fourteen miles apart. I recognized the angular handwriting of my brother, who worked for John Deere all over the Midwest in the 1960s.  He wrote about combines, cultivators, and weather, closing each time with “I miss everybody.”  My sister spun stories about her three stairstep boys that still brought a smile. She made the nursery at Baptist Hospital, where she was head nurse, sound like a Fun House. Letters Mother had written to me in college had made their way back among this collection. There was only one from my dad, written in 1953 from the hospital, where he was recuperating from surgery. His penmanship reminded me of some of those signatures on the Declaration of Independence, large, bold scrawling. “How is my little girl?” he asked. I was four years old.

             They were all gone, all my original family.

            I recognized the bundle of blue aerograms, in my handwriting, sent from Iran when I was in the Peace Corps. I would have to save them for a later date. I gathered the aerograms, Daddy’s letter and a sampling of the others.  I tied them with one of Mother’s ribbons and laid them aside.

            The morning got away from me. I put in another load of laundry and walked the dog. Randolf already had a favorite place, the foot of my bed. I stood in the doorway of the guest room, studying the mess I’d made. I had emptied several boxes but still had too many stacks. What now?

            The phone rang. “Luke and his dad are getting ready to load the bed,” Caroline said.

            “Oh.” My throat tightened. “I’d better get back to work.”

            Once again, I attacked the room, moving boxes against the closet that housed the Murphy bed. I kept filling boxes for the Goodwill, but one corner was designated for items I could not yet give up. Family Bibles and Mother’s photo albums, with photographs all the way back to her childhood. To the stack I added Mother’s report cards. She was valedictorian of her graduating class. I kept her first reader.  

            By the time Luke and his father arrived, more than half the room was empty. They unloaded the bed, television, and entertainment center and began to put everything together. I retreated to the laundry room. After a while, Luke came out. “Come and see how it looks,” he said.

            He had brought a small rug that he or Caroline had thrown on top of the bed before they left their house that Saturday. Sitting in the shelves of the entertainment center was a photo that had made it through the flood, one of him and Caroline on their honeymoon in the Caribbean.

            Looking around, I could imagine what he was seeing. Reminders of the home they’d had, the home where they were happy. “I want to bring the big leather chair - most of the mud has been cleaned off - and a chest of drawers. And some bookshelves. If there’s room,” he said, glancing at the boxes against the closet doors.

            “There will be room,” I promised.

           

            I began the next day with a surge of energy. I took bags to the garbage cans and packed bags bound for the Goodwill into the trunk of my car. There were spaces elsewhere in my house for a few of the keepsakes. I tucked letters in a drawer of the antique bureau that had come from Mother’s house, the drawer where she’d kept letters all those years.

            But as the morning slipped away, my job got harder. I had avoided the box with items that belonged to the brother who died of rheumatic fever when he was sixteen, and I was five. Opening the box, I was transported back to that time, to our drafty farmhouse, to the sorrow that hung over all of us. Mother had saved his blue pajamas, an autograph dog with his friends’ signatures, a cap that he wore to town one day when he was too weak to get out of the car. She had saved some of his schoolwork. He’d had a “homebound teacher” during his last year.  Get-well cards, an autographed photo of Marty Robbins who visited him during his long stay in Baptist Hospital, sympathy notes and cards from funeral flowers.  There were baby shoes, a five-year-diary, my brother’s baby book, and a letter from his doctor. Dr. Thomas Frist, Sr., founder of Hospital Corporation of America, was first a compassionate physician who tried to heal my brother’s damaged heart. His kind letter was typed on an old-timey typewriter.

            “The church sent me a Sunshine box,” the entry in my brother’s diary began when he was eleven, after his first attack of rheumatic fever. His condition worsened over the next five years.  I flipped through the pages. “Daddy went squirrel hunting and killed two,” he reported. “I have not had a fever in 62 days.” The diary was filled with names of people who came to visit. Our house was always full of extended family and friends from church and school, always full of laughter and smells of good food. “I took 325 steps today,” he wrote. “I saw the first robin and a pair of blue birds.”

            I turned to the last entry, written when he was in the hospital in Nashville: “Harold is coming after me in an ambulance.” Our cousin Harold transported him to the small hospital near our house. That was where he died two days later.

            I put the diary, Dr. Frist’s letter, and the baby book in the bureau drawer. Everything else, I threw away, even the baby shoes.

            I didn’t know whether I could go on with this.

            I began tossing everything in sight. Mother’s Christmas decorations, her costume jewelry, Daddy’s ties. On to the boxes of items I should have thrown away when I cleaned out my older brother’s house. Delving into all the memories was just too hard. I filled another garbage bag.

            Early in the afternoon, Jorge, Dominique’s husband, showed up. He’d been working at Caroline and Luke’s house. “Dominique sent me to help you,” he said.

            Good timing. I’d made headway, but now I was looking at my grandfather’s gray cardboard suitcase. 

            “He called it his valise,” I said, opening the lid.

            I told Jorge how, when my grandmother died, before I was born, Granddaddy sold his home and spent the rest of his life with my mother and my aunt. Back and forth he traveled. “I can see him, driving his old car,” I said. “He was crippled from a copperhead bite when he was a little boy. Bald, wire-rimmed spectacles, white mustache, no teeth. He carried this suitcase. In it was everything he owned.”

            “That’s amazing,” Jorge said.

            “He chewed Brown Mule tobacco,” I said, remembering the sweetish smell of it, Granddaddy’s smell. “His eyesight worsened. Eventually he was blind,” I went on. “He lived to be ninety-nine. I never heard him complain. He was a gentle soul.”

            As Jorge looked on, I removed the items from Granddaddy’s valise. His wallet, curved from decades in his hip pocket. Official cards, faded, almost unreadable. The pocket knife he used to cut plugs of Brown Mule. Handkerchiefs, yellowed from age.  His suspenders. Gray pants. Plaid shirts. The special shoe he wore on his crippled foot. A chipped shaving mug and brush, and the straight razor he used to shave himself.

            Unbearably tired, I rubbed my face. “I don’t know what to do with any of this,” I said.

            For a minute we were silent, letting our fingers trail over Granddaddy’s meager possessions.

            “Do you want me to do something with these things?” Jorge asked.

            “Would you?”

            “Sure.”

            We packed everything back into Granddaddy’s valise.

            “I don’t want to know what you do with it,” I said. “Thanks for letting me tell you about Granddaddy. I guess that’s what I needed.”

            Later that afternoon, Luke and his dad brought another load to the room. I had disposed of the boxes. A few, packed with items that I couldn’t let go, were wedged into the closet beside the Murphy bed. But the room belonged to Caroline and Luke now.

            I thought about what I’d thrown away, keepsakes that meant a lot to my mother.  She was a sentimental woman who cherished her memories. I am not entirely different from her. But she was practical, too. She lived through the Depression, when sentimentality was a luxury. Her family’s needs were her highest priority.

            I thought about what I’d kept. Enough to remind me of where I came from. I would pass those memories on to my children and grandchildren. But tonight, in the wake of the disaster that would go down as Nashville’s Epic Flood, what my daughter needed most from me was this room.  

            Max and Grant were with us now. After they went to sleep in their rooms across from each other and Randolf went to sleep on my bed, Caroline and I put sheets on their new mattress. Luke filled the bookshelves with books, DVDs, and photos. We hung pictures on the walls, filled drawers with clean clothes, and set up the floor lamp, which gave off a soft glow.  

            “Get some rest,” I told them.

            “You, too,” Luke said.

            “Thanks, Mom,” Caroline said.

            That night, we could not have imagined that they would never go back to their house, that the baby Caroline was carrying would be born while they were still with me and would spend the first four months of her life at my house. But we would all come to know that the most important things did not get swept away in the flood or sent to the Goodwill or tossed on the garbage heap. Everything that mattered was right there.

pgallaher@copyright 2019
Published in 2 Bridges Review
www.phyllisgobbell.com