Sorting Out What’s What Where and How

We took three bags of our winter jackets, hats, and scarves to Goodwill along with a lamp, a gingham blanket, and the last small stack of my deceased daughter’s clothes. On the porch sits a big plastic bin with my daughter’s blue striped tote bag and two Bibles, combined Old and New Testaments. I have been stuck on what to do with the Bibles. One doesn’t take Bibles like these to Goodwill.

So, I think, should I keep these massive Bibles for my five-year-old granddaughter, Paulina? Or should I try to give them to a pastor friend, someone who might appreciate their heft, find a purpose for their existence, so I don’t have them sitting in the attic for years waiting for someone to remember that they’re there. We already have boxes of jewelry and pictures and other keepsakes of her mother’s stored away.

This morning, Paulina shut the door to her room. It’s her room because that’s where her clothes and things are, her hair ties, stuffed animals, and little mementos of her life with her mom and her new life here with us, but she still sleeps on a cot next to my side of the bed. Our concept of space, however, has become very fluid. We treat the area encompassing our room and hers and my office and most of the downstairs living space as Paulina Land. It’s part of our new life, don’t you know.

Anyway, she emerged from her room reeking of perfume. When asked, she said she’d found the perfume in the drawer of the vanity, the one my folks bought in 1937 and where my mother used to sit painting her nails red with a perfect halfmoon at the cuticle. Unbeknownst to me, my daughter had left three bottles of perfume behind when she suddenly left our house for the hospital.

“You’re too little for perfume,” I told Paulina and she quickly scooped up all three bottles to bring to my room and put on my dresser. “No, keep them in your room. Just don’t wear any.” I’m thinking the perfume reminds her of her mom. Having the bottles on her vanity maybe says something, that the smells in them are still hers even though she’s so little.

“When I get bigger, can I put on perfume?”

The perfume stays. Do the Bibles stay? What about the tote bag?

There is so much losing and keeping and moving on going on here.