Windchimes

letting go and hanging on

Another year creeps to its close. Funny, we say that as if the year could do anything, as if it were an entity with the conscient ability to choose to act, and act on its decisions. Yet time is undeniably passing, leaving tracks on our faces, more gray hairs to hide or proudly display, memories that make a person cringe or smile, shudder or glow. Mostly, the passing of time makes change.

Here I am, waxing philosophical (for whoever still reads this, but mostly for myself) after spending the last Christmas I will ever spend in my parents' house. Just about every Christmas, since 1973 (when they bought the place) has been spent there, but it's been a year and a half since my mom's death, and Dad keeps letting us know that it gets harder and harder to stay there by himself. Not that he wants anyone else to live with him, he just wants less to take care of. Being over 70, I suppose, has enough complications without trying to maintain the unnecessary ones. Life needs as much simplifying as possible.

Dad still gets around pretty well. He doesn't even need a cane yet. Mostly, he needs his hearing aids. He's still lucid, although he has the same kind of memory slips I have...forgetting where I left something, forgetting where I parked, etc. Maybe that's more a sign of how quickly my mental capacity is diminishing than of how slowly his is. I prefer not to believe that though, so I won't. I think I can justify my preference. For example, he recently thought he'd lost his wallet. He got home from a restaurant and thought he'd left it on the table. He looked everywhere for it, forgetting he'd laid it in his desk drawer where he keeps all the accoutrements that go along with having the non-insulin dependent variety of diabetes (I forget whether that's type 1 or type 2). He even looked in that drawer, saw the thing, and thought it was the case for his blood sugar machine. It stayed there for two or three weeks. All of that may sound like the opposite of justification for continuing to have faith in his mental lucidity (and therefore, in mine) but I quickly add, he did have the clarity of mind to cancel all his credit cards and make all the other would-have-been-needed arrangements the first day he believed his wallet lost. In that, he's probably clearer-headed than I am. I would have most likely kept hoping it would turn up somewhere, that I had just misplaced it. In that particular case, I would have been right, but still would have taken a dangerous chance. This happened right around the time he attended his oldest brother's funeral, too, so some added mental stress has to be taken into account.

Senility has not come into the picture, but physical limitations...one of the changes time makes...have. It takes a lot less to tire me out, at 44, than it did just a few years ago. I can only imagine how little it will take at 70. My mother-in-law would chime in with various nutritional intake recommendations at this point. Fruit salad and leafy greens, she would tell you, keep her and my father-in-law healthy, going, and on-the-go. And regular. I won't go there. I came here to try to type my thoughts on losing the house where I grew up where I could easily see them. There will come a time, and it appears to approach quickly, where I will try to help Dad decide what to do with a bunch of things that embody memories. He's been talking about trying to give away the old organ for a while now. It doesn't make music anymore, it only makes a high-pitched whine as soon as anyone turns it on. It seems to only be another noise-making tool for my youngest nieces, and it tempts me to grind my teeth whenever they come close to it. Hard to remember now, the times after church, when Mom and Dad had some church friends over and someone who could play the organ would sit there and accompany someone who could play the piano. Daddy would play either one, and hymn-sings would often follow evening church services. Hymn-sings and card games. Mom could play a mean game of gin-rummy.

All of Mom's old calenders, notebooks and journals are still at the house too, as well as drawers-full of greeting cards and letters she received over the years, and newspaper articles about her friends and acquaintances or their children. And lots of obit articles. And lots of the little paper folders titled "In Memory" given out at funeral homes. Lots of vases from flowers given on birthdays or hospital stays. Lots and lots of family photos. Her wedding silver and china...two different sets. She always used them for Thanksgiving and Christmas dinners. There's her framed embroidery, a picture of two ladies walking up some stairs to a set of double doors, with the saying "Friendship is an endless chain. There's always room for one more name." surrounded by the stitched signatures of everyone in her eighth-grade class. Calenders with the birthdays and anniversaries of her friends and families marked, Sunday-School notebooks with the birthdays, phone numbers and prayer requests of the members of her Sunday-School classes. I suppose there were things Mom sometimes eventually threw away. I just can't figure out what those were.

I remember a Mother's Day, long ago, when we went to their church service. All of my little nephews and nieces wanted to show Grandma the cards and presents they'd made for their mothers in their Sunday School class. A little later, Mom smiled at me while she talked about those things, and said, "You know, I think Mother's Day is really special mostly for mothers of the younger children." I can't remember what they'd made, probably hand-prints in plaster of paris with a crayoned in poem underneath, or the words "I love you, Mom" or some such. After she died, we each found faded construction paper Mother's Day cards we'd made for her during grade-school Sunday-School classes. I don't think I can put into words what purpose keeping them had for her, but I know they then served the purpose of reminding us, one more time, of how special we all were to her and how she loved us.

Some of all this accumulation will have to be pared down when Dad moves into a smaller, easier to maintain place. I think we've all already transferred some of it to our own homes now, but there's still a lot to go through. A lot to decide what to do with. A lot that will probably need to be thrown away. A lot that will probably feel like throwing parts of her life away along with the useless? objects. Especially all the proofs of her connections with friends and family.

There are little figurines and knick-knacks given to her by her students, some given to her by her Sunday-School ladies (my five year old niece always calls them "Grandma's Ladies"...they love that) and friends that moved away years ago, but still kept in touch to the end.

So, the time to let go of the old house approaches. I always knew it would get here eventually. Dad will have to pick a few books to take along from the scads of books they've accumulated over the years. He'll have to let go of some of them. He'll have to let go of quite a bit, but I think he's ready to make the change, to simplify, and I think (I hope) the trade-off will be good for him. Memories can stay in a heart without cluttering up a house, can't they? I know it will probably be tough at first. Dad and Mom never moved much. I remember two houses growing up, the one from which we moved into the house where they've lived since 1973 and this one. There were a few others, of course, before I grew old enough to remember them. The point is, though, that once they settled down somewhere, they settled down. It was the same with church membership. They were members of one church from when I was younger than I can remember until, I think, about 15 years or so ago, and Dad's been a member of the one they moved to since. They came, they stayed, they made friends and helped other people make friends.

I've been thinking lately, that I've overstayed most of my usefulness around this website. That doesn't seem to have much to do with the rest of this entry but it's been on my mind lately as well. I've considered deleting everything (after saving some of it somewhere else) and going away, but I don't think I will, even if I'm not a very active part of this community anymore. I have my reasons, and I suppose I could list them here. They mostly have to do with hoping to hear from old writing.com friends every once in a while and knowing that some of those folks would know of no other way to get in touch with me. Even the ones who've left the site sometimes contact some of us oldie-goldies and oldies, but not so goldies every once in a great while. And maybe I'm just too lazy to try to sort through all the things in my port to decide what to save and what to throw away, or I'm not quite ready to do that just yet. I've privatized the access to quite a few things, and semi-privatized access to quite a few others, so it's not about showing-off. Heck, I really don't even like a lot of the stuff I posted in the first years here, although I appreciate the people who did like it, and let me know.

J.H. Larrew
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