All the Things will Leave

I’m giving my mother’s afghan to Goodwill. It is pretty but very scratchy. Just writing that makes me feel like the afghan being scratchy is an insufficient reason to put it in the used blanket bin at Goodwill. So, I am feeling guilty about wanting to ditch the afghan, you know, after all the work my mom put into it, all the squares crocheted just so, all the Ed Sullivan that was watched, Gunsmoke, Palladin.

Things have to go.

I am oppressed by all these things. My baby shoes, a meat grinder, Thing 1 and Thing 2, a ceramic skunk, adult coloring books, jigsaw puzzles, embroidery kits, empty picture frames, Leonard Cohen’s Book of Longing, Robert’s Rules of Order, a mink hat, and Durant’s ashes. I am skimming the surface.

A week or so after my daughter died, her friend brought over bin after bin of stuff he’d agreed to store until she came back from Nicaragua. The bins sat stacked on our front porch. We’d sit for a while, collect ourselves, and then tackle a bin. Jewelry, pictures, cosmetics, books, journals, purses, satchels, so much that we told him to hold on to whatever was left which sounds crazy but made sense then and still does. The stuff, all the things, well, they were suffocating. Us. Suffocating us.

So, the afghan and all its scratchiness and effort and obligation must go. I want to picture it heaped on a massive pile of my things, the four-part DVD of Lawrence of Arabia, my sewing kit, the blue parrot the boys bought me in Key West, the mug with all the presidents’ signatures (well, not all, thank goodness), and the thank you notes, written and unwritten. In my mind’s eye, the pile becomes a funeral pyre stacked a mile high in the bed of a rusted Ford truck and someone sets it afire on the side of the road next to an abandoned dairy farm.

A fitting end – to the afghan and everything else. Don’t you think?