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“Most of the time, the people who love us don’t necessarily love our stuff.”
Weekly Featured Essay
Love Me, Love My Stuff
by Barbara Belzer Adams
Hank decided it was time for me to do my Swedish death cleaning—a method for getting rid of the cherished objects around your house your heirs probably won’t want— so he jump-started the process by breaking three thirty-year-old holly green glass vases I’d found on vacation and a raku bowl I’d spotted at an art festival two decades ago.
I should probably mention that Hank is a cat.
A feisty grey tabby just past the kitten stage, Hank paved his initial path of destruction in the early morning hours, three consecutive crashes startling me awake. In fairness, he probably had some help: I had put the vases in a kitchen cabinet for safekeeping and my guess is that another family cat opened the door (it’s a unique ability that you have to see to believe: he stands on his hind feet, his claws engaged over the top of the door, then pulls it open by walking backward), giving Hank unfettered access. In less time than it took me to run out of the bedroom, a pile of shattered glass lay on the floor and next to it was a remorseless Hank. He took care of the raku bowl later that day, knocking it off a low shelf WHILE I WATCHED.
Four items down (literally), how many hundreds to go?
MORE ESSAYS
Brotherhood
by Jeffrey B. Burton
Don’t tell anyone I’m going on hospice. My family will just fuck up the works. – Eric
I met Eric in third grade when my family moved suburbs. Our introduction was abrupt and memorable. Eric’s bully-prick of an older brother set the two of us up to fight for the enjoyment of himself and his friends. Eric’s brother invented the “Thunderdome” rule before the Mad Max movie made it famous—”two men enter, one man leaves.” Fortunately, the seventy-five-year-old recess lady broke it up before any damage could be done, but Eric’s brother dragged us aside and whispered, “You two are going to fight tomorrow until we get this thing settled.”
I’ve never been sure exactly what Eric and I needed to get settled, but his brother was adamant about it. Terrified, I didn’t sleep that night and at recess the next day, I headed toward Eric, where he sat near the tetherball court, as though I were walking the plank.
“I guess we’re supposed to fight,” I mumbled.
He glanced at me, then looked up at the sky, and said, “It’s too sunny to fight.”
I exhaled with relief and nodded in total agreement. It was too sunny to fight. Fortunately, his brother was nowhere to be found. Maybe he’d moved on to fresher prey.
As kids do, instead of fighting, we became friends.
Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night: West Meath, February 1976
by T.S.Ollerhead
I caught up with her beyond the fallow field, hoar frost glistening blackened elms, ryegrass stems rustling to her listless tread, and in the corner of the next field, seeking the comfort of an overhanging blackthorn, a small group of heifers nuzzled closely for warmth, their condensing breath heavy in the chill morning air. As we walked in silence towards the stand of skeletal oaks, a solitary raven, late to catch the flock, flapped clumsily away from a high branch.
She had been this way for nearly eight weeks, fifty-something days of self-imposed silence, a deliberate personal catharsis. We headed for the gap between the dying hawthorns and the fallen gate, twisted and neglected, decaying into the land itself. I held her arm as she cautiously picked her way over its mud-slickened crossbeams, her eyes glazed, fixed now on the derelict cottage. It was silent as we approached, quiet in its heavy winter stillness, a chapel-like reverence. She held the blackened roof beam, twisted and weathered from generations of neglect, steady in her watery gaze.
Poor Josie
by Maria Hetherton
I met Noreen in Cork, the year after my mother died. She welcomed me around a table crowded with cousins I’d never met, all of us drinking tea and eating cake and the men sipping whiskey. Everyone laughed when my husband confused a salt cellar with a sugar bowl and put salt in his tea. A few well-placed f-bombs made our discourse pop. We discovered a shared failure as children to keep our mouths shut during school. It all added up: these were my people.
My mother rarely mentioned these cousins in Cork, and was mostly mum on the subject of her childhood in Ireland. She told me her family were among the poor given baskets from the grocers on Boxing Day, and that pregnancy made her mother very cross. The eldest daughter, she was often charged with the care of younger siblings. Sundays, she’d earn a penny escorting her blind aunt to Mass, a penny she refused to relinquish when nuns at school asked alms for children in Africa. A few of her memories bordered on the political, like the rhyme she and her friends enjoyed as children: Colman’s Mustard, Colman’s Starch, tell Mr. Colman to stick it in his arse, Colman’s, of course, a British brand.
Noreen and I still correspond. We exchange cards at Christmas, our families’ latest traumas scribbled into the white space, and emails at random times of year. She’ll share memories of growing up alongside a river in a mill town near Cork. Sometimes we exchange insights from ancestry profiles. Did you know our grandmothers share DNA with the Somerset Cheddar Man? And sometimes, Noreen reveals stories about poor Josie, my mother’s mother, a woman I never knew.
When the World Shakes
by Joanell Serra
When the magnitude seven earthquake hit Northern California in December, I was at home, chatting on the phone with my oldest son in New York. My phone spit out a high pitch blaring alarm with an announcement: EARTHQUAKE NEAR YOU, SEEK COVER.
I dropped the phone and ran to check on my husband, Harry, who is fighting a tough cancer battle and had just headed out with the dog for a backyard rest.
I’m fine. He called out. I’m staying out here. I looked around—a wide grassy area, no trees above him. Good call. I squatted down as well and waited, but other than the slight shudder of an aftershock, we didn’t feel it. I called my son back, but within minutes the screaming sound from my phone started again: TSUNAMI WARNING IN EFFECT. STAY AT LEAST ONE BLOCK INLAND.
This was not a problem for us—we live high on a hill nowhere close to shore. Because we travel back and forth from San Francisco for my husband’s cancer treatments, my phone is set for alerts in both counties.
I scrambled to reach our two other adult children, both in San Francisco that day. My daughter lives about a mile from the ocean. I urged her to stay inside for the next hour just in case. My youngest had just arrived downtown for his shift at a retail store on Market Street. Our messages went from: I’m at work. Can’t talk, to They are closing the store and sending us home. That meant crossing the Golden Gate Bridge. I jumped on the phone and implored him not to cross the bay in the next hour. He sighed.
My buddies are at the beach and they say it isn’t anything yet.
I almost suggested he say goodbye to his surfing buddies, but I held back.
Just promise me you won’t go near the beach. In the two years since my husband’s diagnosis, we have faced chemo, radiation, emergency brain surgery, and more treatments. He is doing fairly well, but we carry a constant sense of waiting for the next crisis.
Gabriel Faure’s Requiem
(In seven gentle movements)
by Gerald Kamens
Introït et Kyrie (Lord, Have Mercy)
This Friday summer night, the work starts slowly. The orchestra begins, playing alone for just one measure, before the large choir, behind the musicians, softly enters the drama, requesting, in Church Latin, eternal rest and lasting light for the soul of the departed one—possibly a deceased parent or other family member, or, maybe, some long-ago king or other potentate.
I sit alone, crouched down in an end chair, in the last row of that ancient cathedral, far back from the performers. I’m not supposed to be there. Just a worn down American, clandestinely absorbing that sublime music rising from these intense, earnest Swiss men and women, mostly young, but some middle-aged or even gray-haired. They’re mostly dressed in jeans and chinos, for this is a rehearsal, called the dress rehearsal in the U.S., despite the casual clothes. The scores of singers and instrumentalists are preparing for the real performance—which will take place on Monday, since rehearsals, I discovered, are not allowed in the cathedral on Saturdays and Sundays. Alas, I can’t be there on Monday, as, my work in Geneva done, I return to Washington, and my family, tomorrow.
This first movement ends with the choir calling to Christ several times, first urgently, then more quietly, until, finally, there is a very soft request for mercy.
My Last Christmas with Mom
by Alexandra Loeb
My mother’s ashes sat on my sister’s mantel in North Carolina, a location of temporary convenience and that in no way fit with my mother’s wishes. I needed to scatter her remains in order to gain closure—or maybe even gain a better understanding of our complicated relationship. With four siblings—all now technically orphans—I figured we could grieve and process together. I envisioned a family gathering where we all actually gathered. My vision bore no resemblance to the loose band of fiercely independent people that we all are—a group of people that seldom gather. Eighteen months after her death, we were still struggling to find the right time and place to scatter her ashes, leaving me untethered.
Sibling conversations had turned frustrating at best, hurtful and full of recriminations at worst.
“Mom moved from the south to San Diego the first chance she had. She was happiest in the Southwest and assumed she’d be scattered there,” my younger sister and I proclaimed.
“Mom should be in North Carolina where most of her kids and grandkids can visit,” the eldest two responded.
“I’ll be back in the states three weeks this entire year, so whatever we do, it has to be then,” the middle sibling, who lives in China, added to the mix.
Our judgements were fierce.
“Did you not know Mom?
“Do you not care about Mom’s wishes?”
“You don’t understand, you don’t have children.”
It devolved from there.
The Collectors
by David Newkirk
There is a box in the basement of my parent’s house that says, “Old Toaster – Doesn’t Work.” It is one of a hundred or more boxes that line rows of shelving or hide in closets, carefully packed for possible future needs. My sister and I have dreaded the eventual day we must meet these boxes in combat, waging a war of (hopefully rapid) attrition as they are reduced by sale, donation, or dumpster.
The dies irae arca, the day of box wrath, drew closer when my father passed away. The boxes now hang on to their tenuous existence in a part of the house that my mobility-limited mother cannot enter, the stairs forming a sort of vertical moat. It is not likely that she will ever bend her now-hunched neck to peer under the lids again. For her, the memory of the boxes has faded, lost in the fog of age, and they have become talismans of the past, of years successfully navigated, of a family successfully raised.
To be clear, my parents were not hoarders. They were children of the Depression, a time when things were much more precious because they were so much harder to acquire. Children of a farmer and a mechanic, they avoided the worst. But the shadow of the dustbowl and the memory of how things had gone so wrong so quickly for so many loomed large. Each item acquired was an upraised middle finger pointed at poverty, a fervent declaration that “I will not go without.” With that came the excitement, or perhaps relief, of a life that became ever so slightly easier with each acquisition.
