And what do you do with family stuff, if you have it?
I have tons of old family memorabilia and objects like lace and jewelry and dishes and silverware and furniture. Some of the stuff I've given to Goodwill or destroyed [letters and certificates and such]. BUT lots of it remains in my life because it needs to go to auction and I haven't the emotional bandwidth to deal with an auctioneer. Maybe one day...
[Rita, Substack makes me sign in every time I return here, even though I have an account on Substack. This involves them stopping me from commenting after I read your post, then sending me an email with a special time sensitive link to your post. I don't know if it just me, but thought you might want to know as it inhibits my ability to comment easily. Certainly I'm not the only account Substack plays games with.]
I don't think I'd have that kind of emotional bandwidth, either. Going to auction sounds like a lot, somehow. I wouldn't even know how to begin that.
I'm so sorry you have to sign in every time. Thank you for letting me know. I get the same thing when I want to comment on some other newsletters, and I have no idea why. It doesn't require it all the time, and it's not all newsletters. I just went back and checked through all my settings, and I don't see anything that looks obvious for dealing with this issue. Grrr....
I don't know for sure, of course, but I suspect your great-grandmother wouldn't be upset with you for "wrecking" her quilt, and would likely have understood that with use, comes wear and tear. And again, I don't know for sure, but I also suspect she'd rather the second quilt was displayed or used, rather than tucked away in a box somewhere, even if that meant it lasted longer.
Last September I went "home" for the first time in six years and was handed a bag of things that my brother and SIL had set aside for me when they moved my mom from her apartment to her long-term care home. I still haven't worked up the courage to go through the bag because I know I will be torn about what to do with the items. On the same trip I visited my stepmother, who "inherited" all the items that my mother had left in the house when she separated from my dad. I ended up taking an embroidery that my mother made, even though it brings up bad memories, just because I couldn't bear the thought of it eventually going to Goodwill. (Unfortunately, I had to leave it at my MIL's house because it was too large for my suitcase. It is just one thing among a VAST collection in her basement, but I know that I will one day have to deal with it, or ask someone else to deal with it, which makes me feel guilty.) Because I had a difficult relationship with my mother, I find myself feeling very torn about keeping the things she made. But when I consider how I treasure the few small things that I have that belonged to my maternal grandparents (a wallet, a ring, and a small wooden stool), it makes me think I should be preserving some of my mother's things for her grandchildren. It probably goes without saying, but I find all of this extremely tricky!
I realize this post was mainly about creative legacies and family "stuff," but I just wanted to make a comment about women writers who are not "solely responsible for their own financial support." Why, I want to rail (at the world, not at you, Rita!) does it *always* come down to money? What about the countless ways a wife supports a husband? What about the small fact of a mother often being solely responsible for keeping a father's children alive while he goes off and earns money? Why does that not count? (Rhetorical questions only. No need to reply.)
Oh, it is all tricky, isn't it? I'm wondering if you've read the Swedish death cleaning book that the opening quotation comes from. It really helped me start to think about things differently. I mean, I still have all kinds of things that probably no one else is going to want, but it helped me think about what to keep and why. I needed that when I moved from a larger house to the small one I'm in now.
I was wondering if I needed to give fuller context for the Anne Tyler quotation, and now I wish I did! I know you're not asking for a response to that, but I hope it's OK if I give one. The whole essay is really about how writing fits (or fit--it was written when she was raising children) into the rest of her life. In that section she was thinking about how things are different for her husband (also a novelist, and also a full-time doctor) and herself. She made it very clear that both worked under limitations and both played important roles in their family life--just different ones. She said that they both had luxuries--his was that no one expected him to drop all of his work to meet the family's needs, the way she had to. I'm sorry if something in the way I recounted this made it seem as if she or I was saying that the work of wives doesn't count. I think her point is that it is harder to create if you're responsible for making the money and for raising children and for making the household run; there's so little give that situation. Some people do create in those circumstances, though. I just was never able to do much then. Even though I theoretically might be able to now (I have much more time available to me now), it's still challenging. I've come to be OK with that, which is the point I really wanted to make.
I have indeed read the Swedish Death Cleaning book! I happened across it shortly after it came out, and it took everything I had to not get a copy for my MIL.
Of course it's ok that you responded to my rhetorical questions. :)
Yes, I agree that if you're responsible for making the money and raising children and making the household run, that you'll have little left in your tank for creative endeavours. My railings weren't really aimed at what she said, or what you said, but are more general. I just find it incredibly frustrating that work done in the home for one's family is not considered work, while the same work performed for money for non-family *is* considered work. I understand the need to talk about privilege—about being fortunate enough to exist in a space where someone else mostly (or wholly) earns the money—but I always feel that language has the effect of nullifying, or at least seriously diluting, the work that you *are* doing, for which you're not being directly compensated. I think my main point is that women seem to have to talk about the privilege of having a home/food/clothing despite not earning enough to solely support herself, but men don't seem to have to talk about their privileges, whether it's having a wife to take care of the kids he created with her, or coming home to dinner on the table, or always finding an ironed shirt in the closet. Studies have shown that married men live longer than bachelors, and that married fathers end up with an earnings boost (as opposed to women who take a motherhood penalty). Do men acknowledge this? Maybe some do, but most, I'd wager, don't. (FWIW, I also rail at Virginia Woolf, for the reputedly horrible way she treated her servants. If she had had to do all her own cooking/cleaning/laundry, perhaps she wouldn't have been able to write as much as she did.) Hoo boy. I'd better stop with all this railing. Sorry, Rita! :)
No apologies necessary! Now that my primary "job" is running the household, I feel all of this. It prompted us to renegotiate some financial agreements last fall. And I think it was just this past week that I was talking to someone about the fact that married men live longer than unmarried men, but single women live longer than married women. Don't have to be a rocket scientist to do that math on that! The point about VW is valid, and I like to think she'd agree with you. As Walker pointed out in her essay, in A Room of One's Own Woolf discussed the need not only for a room, but for enough money to support oneself. (I'm disappointed to learn about the treatment of her household workers. Ugh.)
I feel privileged to have read this Rita - thank you for giving me a window to a world I don't know. I suppose that's what writing is. Another way to be a quilt of everyday use .I shall carry that phrase with me xx
Ah the burden and joy of things/memorabilia/stuff/heirlooms... Of my great-grandparents we have almost nothing, of my grandparents, a little more, of my parents way too much, and I am swimming in stuff that I need to pare down before we move in June. I do think a good photograph can do wonders so the objects are documented before disintegration or donation or selling. My great grandmother's embroidery sampler that she made as a girl in 1880 is a treasure that my family's line does not possess - but I took a photograph of it, I can zoom into it, my mom and I went to the village on the shores of the Bosphorus where she made it. I don't need the sampler itself to have it and feel connected to my ancestor who made it.
I have often read minimalist writers recommending this strategy, and I have always wondered if it really works. I feel such a jolt of pleasure when I come across physical artifacts that I haven't seen in awhile, and I've wondered if I could get the same feeling from a photograph. I appreciate your story as evidence that a photo is a worthy substitute. Of course, then I'd have to get better at managing my photos...another project I keep putting off.
Which brings me to a question that you are one of the best people I could ask: We have a lot of old family photos. My husband has begun scanning his, with the goal of organizing them and then discarding the original prints. Something in my core strongly objects to discarding the original photos! Even though they are right now just sitting in boxes. Any thoughts on this?
I do think the photograph of the sampler is enough because it simply has to be, the sampler belongs to a cousin. I would find it incredibly fraught to take a photograph and then discard an heirloom we possess but if I absolutely had to, having the photograph is some consolation.
I could not get rid of original old family photographs because while scanning images is a method of preservation in and of itself and a great way to share with others who don't have the originals, what happens to those files to ensure that they are not lost? Are they in a computer? A hard drive? The cloud? Who has possession and access to these files? How can they be perused in an enjoyable way? We scanned in a lot of family photos from my mom's sisters and cousin and made a lovely family book to be looked through and enjoyed, but the originals are very much in tact. I agree with your instinct to hang on to the original photographs, or at the very least the most precious ones.
Thank you so much for sharing this perspective! Maybe I just like having my own gut instincts validated, but I feel very much as you do. Years ago I got to do a project with William Stafford's archives at Lewis and Clark College, and I've never forgotten what the librarian there said about the value of words written on paper--that it is the most stable technology we have. He was lamenting a bit that in the future we will not have the same access to a writer's process that we have had in the past because now it happens in digital files that are discarded or lost.
Just as a zoom call is never the same as being literally in the same room with someone we love--much as I am grateful that zoom calls exist, and I hope we never lose them--I think a photo cannot be the same as a physical artifact.
I so appreciate a photographer weighing in on these questions. Thank you!
We are kindred spirits, Rita. So many tales embedded in the threads, and grain, and dust of these old pieces. I really appreciate how you wrestled with the meaning of value, and how we attach and detach meaning across our lives. "Permanence, I know now, cannot be the determinant of artistic value, for either a creator or an audience." True, but I'm so grateful to have tangible evidence of those who were instrumental in me becoming me. I know there will be a point when the trappings of those generations, and their stories, will be lost. And then, I suppose, mine will be the next generation to be held and remembered, for a short little while. Beautiful essay!
Yes, we are kindred spirits, and I'm so glad to have found one in you. This essay/post would not have been written if you hadn't asked me about the quilt in the photo I shared in my last post. I'm grateful for the nudge to consider the quilt again, and more deeply.
In that line about permanence you quoted, I think I am trying to convince myself of its truth because I am also so grateful to have the tangible evidence I have of those who were instrumental in forming me, and I want to feel OK about those things falling apart or passing on to those who may find little meaning in them. I suppose the trappings of earlier generations get lost because those objects don't have much meaning to those who were not formed by the people who made them, especially if the objects are made of materials that easily deteriorate or take a domestic, everyday use sort of form.
I find that not everyone wants (or needs) the tangible evidence. It's meaningful to me, but as we were sorting through the last of my parents' belongings, they wanted little to none of it. Partly, I think that's because they know I'll be the keeper of those items. But I also think it's just not what they choose to hold close.
I wrote a poem about a kitchen fork that belonged to my mother. https://elizabethbeggins.substack.com/p/keepsake No one but me will ever find any sentiment in it, so when I'm gone it will "cease to exist." But it brings me joy now, and that's what matters.
I love the poem about the fork--thank you for pointing me to it. I loved being able to see the photo of it. I'm guessing it might end up in a thrift store at some point. Maybe then it will become something that has meaning for someone else.
About objects, I will say this: After my grandmother died in 2018, my uncle had his daughters and me go through the house and choose the things we wanted to take from it. Later, he said to me, "You chose the weirdest things." Maybe I did; some of them I have already passed on. But as I write these words, I can see the chunky wood candleholders my grandfather made when he retired and took up woodworking, and I can see the bells my great-aunt Rosa brought back from a trip to Germany to research our family tree. I'm sure my kids will one day give them away, having only the faintest memory of my grandfather and none of Rosa, but as you say, they bring me joy now, and that's what matters.
I went minimalist for a few years and got rid of a lot of unimportant things but somehow managed to keep the better little things, a letter I wrote to my father aged 4, etc. I would love a quilt and have thought about making one for my children, but they wouldn’t want it. I think things should be used. As I’ve come out of minimalism and into mediumism that’s what Ive realised, especially as my kids just aren’t interested.
I love the idea of mediumism--that is for sure a philosophy I'm better suited for than minimalism. Part of me loves to let go of things. I like space and order and lightness. But I also love the artifacts of people I love, especially when I no longer have them. I guess my kids are going to have some stuff to deal with, and maybe that's OK, as long as it isn't too much. Maybe we get to keep some of the things we love just because we love them, even if those who are around after us will not love them. I'm happy to do that for my parents. I wouldn't want them to give away anything precious to them, just to spare me from the chore of figuring out what to do with those things later.
I love stuff with stories. I try to take photos and write down the stories if I need to let something go. I go with William Morris on this “Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful.” (love can be considered beautiful)
Why can't we live closer so we can discuss these amazing posts over coffee, tea, or pie?
Women have definitely evolved over time. I think that in the last 53 years, I have lived many lives, if that makes sense. I didn't particularly like Anna (yours, not mine). But then I think about my grandmother, and after doing soul homework, I realize I don't really like what she's said or done to my mother. NOW, times were very different, and they were under far more pressure in society and at home than we can imagine. It's just interesting to hear these stories. You write so beautifully and you make it sound like it happened last week, which is why it's so interesting.
That quilt is lovely. I have the quilt that my grandmother made for me and my ex-husband for our wedding on the bed in Anna's room/my office. I look at it every day. The dogs lay on it. It gets used. I don't think my grandma would like that. I love it.
I was going to write something else, but the post disappears when I comment, so I'll have to publish the comment and come back. Brain fog is the worst.
Perhaps we don't live closer because we'd spend so much time over coffee, tea, and pie that we wouldn't get anything else done?
I would love to talk with you about the legacies of our grandmothers and great-grandmothers. What is the story of your grandmother? What might have wounded her? I have complicated feelings about Anna--too much to put into a comment here. I think my great-grandmothers' lives were hard in ways I can only imagine and never know. Just being a woman in their time! And then to be immigrants on top of that, or even to have moved across this country, so far away from everyone and everything they'd known? I regret moving from Seattle to Portland, because of the distance it put me from my family! In a time of cars and planes! I try to live in a place of compassion with regard to them, but it is hard to see how the damage flowed from one generation through the next and the next.
As for quilts, I think they are for using. I know some people make them as works of art, and that's probably a different thing, but I think we should use the ones made for using. I'm glad you are using yours, and that it being a gift for a marriage that didn't last doesn't detract from your love of it.
No worries about coming back here. Brain fog IS the worst, and I'm sorry you're having to deal with that. My brain has been fuzzy since November, especially when I am on my migraine meds. Hope you can give yourself some permission and space to just be where you are now.
My grandmother gave birth to my mother at the age of 42 after being told she couldn't conceive. I believe there was some resentment toward my mother there. Women were not allowed to be resentful or make choices back then. She was a very different parent to my mother than her mother was to her, but her mother was already a grandmother at the age of 42...
Oh, there is a story there, Kari! Having my own history with infertility, I can imagine some of the ways in which this might have been hard for your grandmother. I am so, so grateful I got to be a mother, but I am also so, so grateful that I am not raising any children at this age. More than once I have wondered how it is for women who have surprise babies late in life.
And what do you do with family stuff, if you have it?
I have tons of old family memorabilia and objects like lace and jewelry and dishes and silverware and furniture. Some of the stuff I've given to Goodwill or destroyed [letters and certificates and such]. BUT lots of it remains in my life because it needs to go to auction and I haven't the emotional bandwidth to deal with an auctioneer. Maybe one day...
[Rita, Substack makes me sign in every time I return here, even though I have an account on Substack. This involves them stopping me from commenting after I read your post, then sending me an email with a special time sensitive link to your post. I don't know if it just me, but thought you might want to know as it inhibits my ability to comment easily. Certainly I'm not the only account Substack plays games with.]
I don't think I'd have that kind of emotional bandwidth, either. Going to auction sounds like a lot, somehow. I wouldn't even know how to begin that.
I'm so sorry you have to sign in every time. Thank you for letting me know. I get the same thing when I want to comment on some other newsletters, and I have no idea why. It doesn't require it all the time, and it's not all newsletters. I just went back and checked through all my settings, and I don't see anything that looks obvious for dealing with this issue. Grrr....
I don't know for sure, of course, but I suspect your great-grandmother wouldn't be upset with you for "wrecking" her quilt, and would likely have understood that with use, comes wear and tear. And again, I don't know for sure, but I also suspect she'd rather the second quilt was displayed or used, rather than tucked away in a box somewhere, even if that meant it lasted longer.
Last September I went "home" for the first time in six years and was handed a bag of things that my brother and SIL had set aside for me when they moved my mom from her apartment to her long-term care home. I still haven't worked up the courage to go through the bag because I know I will be torn about what to do with the items. On the same trip I visited my stepmother, who "inherited" all the items that my mother had left in the house when she separated from my dad. I ended up taking an embroidery that my mother made, even though it brings up bad memories, just because I couldn't bear the thought of it eventually going to Goodwill. (Unfortunately, I had to leave it at my MIL's house because it was too large for my suitcase. It is just one thing among a VAST collection in her basement, but I know that I will one day have to deal with it, or ask someone else to deal with it, which makes me feel guilty.) Because I had a difficult relationship with my mother, I find myself feeling very torn about keeping the things she made. But when I consider how I treasure the few small things that I have that belonged to my maternal grandparents (a wallet, a ring, and a small wooden stool), it makes me think I should be preserving some of my mother's things for her grandchildren. It probably goes without saying, but I find all of this extremely tricky!
I realize this post was mainly about creative legacies and family "stuff," but I just wanted to make a comment about women writers who are not "solely responsible for their own financial support." Why, I want to rail (at the world, not at you, Rita!) does it *always* come down to money? What about the countless ways a wife supports a husband? What about the small fact of a mother often being solely responsible for keeping a father's children alive while he goes off and earns money? Why does that not count? (Rhetorical questions only. No need to reply.)
Oh, it is all tricky, isn't it? I'm wondering if you've read the Swedish death cleaning book that the opening quotation comes from. It really helped me start to think about things differently. I mean, I still have all kinds of things that probably no one else is going to want, but it helped me think about what to keep and why. I needed that when I moved from a larger house to the small one I'm in now.
I was wondering if I needed to give fuller context for the Anne Tyler quotation, and now I wish I did! I know you're not asking for a response to that, but I hope it's OK if I give one. The whole essay is really about how writing fits (or fit--it was written when she was raising children) into the rest of her life. In that section she was thinking about how things are different for her husband (also a novelist, and also a full-time doctor) and herself. She made it very clear that both worked under limitations and both played important roles in their family life--just different ones. She said that they both had luxuries--his was that no one expected him to drop all of his work to meet the family's needs, the way she had to. I'm sorry if something in the way I recounted this made it seem as if she or I was saying that the work of wives doesn't count. I think her point is that it is harder to create if you're responsible for making the money and for raising children and for making the household run; there's so little give that situation. Some people do create in those circumstances, though. I just was never able to do much then. Even though I theoretically might be able to now (I have much more time available to me now), it's still challenging. I've come to be OK with that, which is the point I really wanted to make.
I have indeed read the Swedish Death Cleaning book! I happened across it shortly after it came out, and it took everything I had to not get a copy for my MIL.
Of course it's ok that you responded to my rhetorical questions. :)
Yes, I agree that if you're responsible for making the money and raising children and making the household run, that you'll have little left in your tank for creative endeavours. My railings weren't really aimed at what she said, or what you said, but are more general. I just find it incredibly frustrating that work done in the home for one's family is not considered work, while the same work performed for money for non-family *is* considered work. I understand the need to talk about privilege—about being fortunate enough to exist in a space where someone else mostly (or wholly) earns the money—but I always feel that language has the effect of nullifying, or at least seriously diluting, the work that you *are* doing, for which you're not being directly compensated. I think my main point is that women seem to have to talk about the privilege of having a home/food/clothing despite not earning enough to solely support herself, but men don't seem to have to talk about their privileges, whether it's having a wife to take care of the kids he created with her, or coming home to dinner on the table, or always finding an ironed shirt in the closet. Studies have shown that married men live longer than bachelors, and that married fathers end up with an earnings boost (as opposed to women who take a motherhood penalty). Do men acknowledge this? Maybe some do, but most, I'd wager, don't. (FWIW, I also rail at Virginia Woolf, for the reputedly horrible way she treated her servants. If she had had to do all her own cooking/cleaning/laundry, perhaps she wouldn't have been able to write as much as she did.) Hoo boy. I'd better stop with all this railing. Sorry, Rita! :)
No apologies necessary! Now that my primary "job" is running the household, I feel all of this. It prompted us to renegotiate some financial agreements last fall. And I think it was just this past week that I was talking to someone about the fact that married men live longer than unmarried men, but single women live longer than married women. Don't have to be a rocket scientist to do that math on that! The point about VW is valid, and I like to think she'd agree with you. As Walker pointed out in her essay, in A Room of One's Own Woolf discussed the need not only for a room, but for enough money to support oneself. (I'm disappointed to learn about the treatment of her household workers. Ugh.)
I feel privileged to have read this Rita - thank you for giving me a window to a world I don't know. I suppose that's what writing is. Another way to be a quilt of everyday use .I shall carry that phrase with me xx
Thank you! I really have to give credit to Walker for helping me think about what "everyday use" might mean.
Ah the burden and joy of things/memorabilia/stuff/heirlooms... Of my great-grandparents we have almost nothing, of my grandparents, a little more, of my parents way too much, and I am swimming in stuff that I need to pare down before we move in June. I do think a good photograph can do wonders so the objects are documented before disintegration or donation or selling. My great grandmother's embroidery sampler that she made as a girl in 1880 is a treasure that my family's line does not possess - but I took a photograph of it, I can zoom into it, my mom and I went to the village on the shores of the Bosphorus where she made it. I don't need the sampler itself to have it and feel connected to my ancestor who made it.
I have often read minimalist writers recommending this strategy, and I have always wondered if it really works. I feel such a jolt of pleasure when I come across physical artifacts that I haven't seen in awhile, and I've wondered if I could get the same feeling from a photograph. I appreciate your story as evidence that a photo is a worthy substitute. Of course, then I'd have to get better at managing my photos...another project I keep putting off.
Which brings me to a question that you are one of the best people I could ask: We have a lot of old family photos. My husband has begun scanning his, with the goal of organizing them and then discarding the original prints. Something in my core strongly objects to discarding the original photos! Even though they are right now just sitting in boxes. Any thoughts on this?
I do think the photograph of the sampler is enough because it simply has to be, the sampler belongs to a cousin. I would find it incredibly fraught to take a photograph and then discard an heirloom we possess but if I absolutely had to, having the photograph is some consolation.
I could not get rid of original old family photographs because while scanning images is a method of preservation in and of itself and a great way to share with others who don't have the originals, what happens to those files to ensure that they are not lost? Are they in a computer? A hard drive? The cloud? Who has possession and access to these files? How can they be perused in an enjoyable way? We scanned in a lot of family photos from my mom's sisters and cousin and made a lovely family book to be looked through and enjoyed, but the originals are very much in tact. I agree with your instinct to hang on to the original photographs, or at the very least the most precious ones.
Thank you so much for sharing this perspective! Maybe I just like having my own gut instincts validated, but I feel very much as you do. Years ago I got to do a project with William Stafford's archives at Lewis and Clark College, and I've never forgotten what the librarian there said about the value of words written on paper--that it is the most stable technology we have. He was lamenting a bit that in the future we will not have the same access to a writer's process that we have had in the past because now it happens in digital files that are discarded or lost.
Just as a zoom call is never the same as being literally in the same room with someone we love--much as I am grateful that zoom calls exist, and I hope we never lose them--I think a photo cannot be the same as a physical artifact.
I so appreciate a photographer weighing in on these questions. Thank you!
We are kindred spirits, Rita. So many tales embedded in the threads, and grain, and dust of these old pieces. I really appreciate how you wrestled with the meaning of value, and how we attach and detach meaning across our lives. "Permanence, I know now, cannot be the determinant of artistic value, for either a creator or an audience." True, but I'm so grateful to have tangible evidence of those who were instrumental in me becoming me. I know there will be a point when the trappings of those generations, and their stories, will be lost. And then, I suppose, mine will be the next generation to be held and remembered, for a short little while. Beautiful essay!
Yes, we are kindred spirits, and I'm so glad to have found one in you. This essay/post would not have been written if you hadn't asked me about the quilt in the photo I shared in my last post. I'm grateful for the nudge to consider the quilt again, and more deeply.
In that line about permanence you quoted, I think I am trying to convince myself of its truth because I am also so grateful to have the tangible evidence I have of those who were instrumental in forming me, and I want to feel OK about those things falling apart or passing on to those who may find little meaning in them. I suppose the trappings of earlier generations get lost because those objects don't have much meaning to those who were not formed by the people who made them, especially if the objects are made of materials that easily deteriorate or take a domestic, everyday use sort of form.
I find that not everyone wants (or needs) the tangible evidence. It's meaningful to me, but as we were sorting through the last of my parents' belongings, they wanted little to none of it. Partly, I think that's because they know I'll be the keeper of those items. But I also think it's just not what they choose to hold close.
I wrote a poem about a kitchen fork that belonged to my mother. https://elizabethbeggins.substack.com/p/keepsake No one but me will ever find any sentiment in it, so when I'm gone it will "cease to exist." But it brings me joy now, and that's what matters.
I love the poem about the fork--thank you for pointing me to it. I loved being able to see the photo of it. I'm guessing it might end up in a thrift store at some point. Maybe then it will become something that has meaning for someone else.
About objects, I will say this: After my grandmother died in 2018, my uncle had his daughters and me go through the house and choose the things we wanted to take from it. Later, he said to me, "You chose the weirdest things." Maybe I did; some of them I have already passed on. But as I write these words, I can see the chunky wood candleholders my grandfather made when he retired and took up woodworking, and I can see the bells my great-aunt Rosa brought back from a trip to Germany to research our family tree. I'm sure my kids will one day give them away, having only the faintest memory of my grandfather and none of Rosa, but as you say, they bring me joy now, and that's what matters.
🕯 🔔 🧡
I went minimalist for a few years and got rid of a lot of unimportant things but somehow managed to keep the better little things, a letter I wrote to my father aged 4, etc. I would love a quilt and have thought about making one for my children, but they wouldn’t want it. I think things should be used. As I’ve come out of minimalism and into mediumism that’s what Ive realised, especially as my kids just aren’t interested.
I love the idea of mediumism--that is for sure a philosophy I'm better suited for than minimalism. Part of me loves to let go of things. I like space and order and lightness. But I also love the artifacts of people I love, especially when I no longer have them. I guess my kids are going to have some stuff to deal with, and maybe that's OK, as long as it isn't too much. Maybe we get to keep some of the things we love just because we love them, even if those who are around after us will not love them. I'm happy to do that for my parents. I wouldn't want them to give away anything precious to them, just to spare me from the chore of figuring out what to do with those things later.
I love stuff with stories. I try to take photos and write down the stories if I need to let something go. I go with William Morris on this “Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful.” (love can be considered beautiful)
I think love is useful, too.
Why can't we live closer so we can discuss these amazing posts over coffee, tea, or pie?
Women have definitely evolved over time. I think that in the last 53 years, I have lived many lives, if that makes sense. I didn't particularly like Anna (yours, not mine). But then I think about my grandmother, and after doing soul homework, I realize I don't really like what she's said or done to my mother. NOW, times were very different, and they were under far more pressure in society and at home than we can imagine. It's just interesting to hear these stories. You write so beautifully and you make it sound like it happened last week, which is why it's so interesting.
That quilt is lovely. I have the quilt that my grandmother made for me and my ex-husband for our wedding on the bed in Anna's room/my office. I look at it every day. The dogs lay on it. It gets used. I don't think my grandma would like that. I love it.
I was going to write something else, but the post disappears when I comment, so I'll have to publish the comment and come back. Brain fog is the worst.
Perhaps we don't live closer because we'd spend so much time over coffee, tea, and pie that we wouldn't get anything else done?
I would love to talk with you about the legacies of our grandmothers and great-grandmothers. What is the story of your grandmother? What might have wounded her? I have complicated feelings about Anna--too much to put into a comment here. I think my great-grandmothers' lives were hard in ways I can only imagine and never know. Just being a woman in their time! And then to be immigrants on top of that, or even to have moved across this country, so far away from everyone and everything they'd known? I regret moving from Seattle to Portland, because of the distance it put me from my family! In a time of cars and planes! I try to live in a place of compassion with regard to them, but it is hard to see how the damage flowed from one generation through the next and the next.
As for quilts, I think they are for using. I know some people make them as works of art, and that's probably a different thing, but I think we should use the ones made for using. I'm glad you are using yours, and that it being a gift for a marriage that didn't last doesn't detract from your love of it.
No worries about coming back here. Brain fog IS the worst, and I'm sorry you're having to deal with that. My brain has been fuzzy since November, especially when I am on my migraine meds. Hope you can give yourself some permission and space to just be where you are now.
My grandmother gave birth to my mother at the age of 42 after being told she couldn't conceive. I believe there was some resentment toward my mother there. Women were not allowed to be resentful or make choices back then. She was a very different parent to my mother than her mother was to her, but her mother was already a grandmother at the age of 42...
Oh, there is a story there, Kari! Having my own history with infertility, I can imagine some of the ways in which this might have been hard for your grandmother. I am so, so grateful I got to be a mother, but I am also so, so grateful that I am not raising any children at this age. More than once I have wondered how it is for women who have surprise babies late in life.
Yes you are completely right. I wasn’t looking at it that way, but yes!