Today I offered a picture prompt in a poetry group and wrote something that wasn’t quite a poem. I also didn’t respond directly to the picture. (I’m such a rebel.) I did respond to the idea of old and discarded things that were once held dear.
Here’s the picture I offered, if you’d like to respond in the comments with what it brings up for you.
(Photo by Pixabay: https://www.pexels.com/photo/man-in-bus-247929/)
Inheritance
No one wants our old stuff. Auction house doors bulge with china cabinets, buffets, hutches, credenzas, highboys, and pianos—the pieces we once clung to as if discarding them meant something cruel.
My parents held an estate sale after they sold the house and moved to the Caribbean. We lamented, blaming them for forgetting us. “These are our things,” they said. “And this is our life. You can come to buy what you like.”
Buy? The mahogany dining room set complete with the china cabinet filled with my grandmother’s painted teacups, my wrought iron bed I’d shared with my sister until she married and it was mine, the swirly blue oval rug I lay propped on elbows to watch TV, now with numbers affixed, strangers touching them.
We were each given a piece or two. I was lucky to receive Grandpa Joe’s hand-built bookcase, Nana’s dressing table, and Gaga’s nursing rocker.
When the lid to her mother’s Limoges serving dish had crashed from the cupboard to the floor, my mother drew herself up and said, “It’s just a thing. Be grateful it didn’t fall on anyone’s head.” She turned her face away while I gathered the pieces to see if I could put them back together. Her mother’s precious set, handed down with love, now lidless.
Devalued in the estate sale.
Those gold-rimmed teacups Gaga painted—the blooming purples and yellows delicate and wistful—how much did they go for? We’d never sipped from them, although I recall asking once. Where are they now? In some crowded auction house gathering dust? In the glass-fronted china cabinet that was part of the set I would have purchased had my tiny apartment included a dining room?
These are times of minimalism and light. No one seems to want these dark, heavy things.
And anyway, they are just things.
Things that haven’t fallen on anyone’s head.
Here’s a picture that’s perhaps more in keeping with the theme of what I wrote.
I’d love to read your response to the idea of old or discarded things.
It saddens me, the big part of me that does not want to hold onto the precious old things (my mother's, grandmother's). But I have felt like a nomad in this present life, not wanting to be weighed down.
This is my worst fear - that the objects I treasure like all the things my mother kept in the breakfront, ashtrays with our family name, my father's army shirt, the dress my mother wore to my wedding, my son's baby shoes and locks of his hair from his first haircut - will be tossed out when I'm no longer here to defend their honor and legacy. I hope at least one of my granddaughters will value family history.