Simplify, organize, de-clutter, recycle, become a minimalist. I do want order and space, no closet doors, or drawers shoved shut like the suitcase I sit on to close. It eludes me as I deny the resolutions, pleas, promises made when viewing disgusting, but compelling hoarding reality shows.
I am sorting through my mother's life, my mother's treasures. It overwhelms me. The floor carpeted in papers,recipes, yellowed scraps about , her lawyer, relatives, classmates, her dentist who won the lotto. Obituaries overflow their metal coffin, the dead box . Pictures tucked into envelopes, books, letters, a scavenger hunt into the belly of the endless bags. Hours escape as I meet this woman, this girl, my mother. She's funny and feisty. She fights with boys and has a secret detective club, where she of course is the president. She has many pictures and letters of boys in military uniforms, who ask her to write and think she's swell. There is her senior writing project with all her dreams and aspirations inked on lined paper in 1945. How I miss my mother and now I miss this other mother, who was gone before I was born.
1 comment:
Gone before we could know them - these mothers of ours. How well do we really know our parents? Oh, the questions we think to ask when they are gone.
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