At Sunday night supper, a friend and I
had a friendly but heated discussion. I was explaining to Sue, my good friend,
that I had two marble-topped pieces of furniture that matched my bed but
probably wouldn’t fit in the cottage. Her instant reply was, “Get rid of them.”
I said no, they were family pieces, very old, with both sentiment and value
attached to them.
“So are you going to pay storage fees
on them for forty years?”
“Probably,” Jordan said. They have
rented two storage units for the leftovers from their house already.
Sue was completely exasperated.
The world, I’ve discovered during this
move and downsizing, is made up of sentimentalists and hard-hearted realists. I
am obviously a sentimentalist. I have many antiques--not Louis 14th
spindly things but good solid pieces from late 19th and early 20th
century America. My mother’s secretary—when my brother and I look at it, we see
Mom sitting there paying bills.
My bed—mahogany, with a six-foot headboard and
four-foot footboard. I remember crawling into it as a toddler when I had a
nightmare. The two marble-topped pieces mentioned above match the bed.
Jordan and Christian are keeping the
sideboard that I remember from my Canadian grandmother’s house—built in 1846—and
my dining table, which is not a family piece but beautiful nonetheless.
My point is that so many of these
pieces hold memories that I could not just get rid of them. This weekend I will
offer a couple of things again to my children, and I’ve discussed the marble-topped
with my brother. If some of those pieces go to storage, maybe on down the line
some grandchildren will want them. My niece was delighted to get a set of her
grandmother’s china and said, ‘I’m just grateful to have anything of hers.” So
maybe we’re a family of sentimentalists. I like to think that.
And here is a corner of my bedroom during the move--not much sentimental about this.
