A House Divided

Parsing things, preserving memories

Me looking things over after the great divide

I pulled out the sticky notes: bright green for me and my daughter, yellow for my son and blue for my husband. Was there something subliminal in the color choices? My daughter and I were embarking on new chapters; my son was continuing one; and my husband and I were soft separating.

“This is where we’ll start,” I said, leading them to the dining room. The mood was surprisingly light, given that we were dividing up the furniture and artwork that had decorated our family home for the past 14 years.

Rather than putting everything in storage – we were all moving to separate, small apartments – it made sense from both a logistical and emotional standpoint to divide everything. Since no one would have a family home base to go to for the foreseeable future, we decided together to take our home with us.

Sometime in the next couple of years I planned on establishing such a base, one where we could use the same cookie sheet that had been in my family for at least 70 years; where the “Cupcakes make me happy” sign would be hung in the kitchen; where I could pull the Christmas decorations from a closet, including at least 20 ornaments that the kids had chosen from a store each year, hung on the tree and then recounted about how and why that particular ornament was selected. The same stories are told every year and we are rapt with attention no matter how well we know the details.

That’s how tradition is made. The same things. Over and over.

For now, the boxes of ornaments, including some from my parents that were at least 80 years old, would stay protected in a plastic bin in a storage unit somewhere in Maryland with some other possessions.

We stood around the dining room table, a chunky hardwood piece that always reminded me of something from the Dark Ages with its sturdy legs and hardy metal brackets.

“Does anyone want it?” I said.

“I like the chairs,” said my husband, Rick.

“Yeah,” the kids echoed, distracted.

We all stood looking at the table, lost in our private memories – dinners, birthdays, making gingerbread houses, gatherings with friends, the laughter, the arguments, the dogs underfoot. I remembered upholstering the chair cushions those many years ago, selecting a thick gold jacquard that could withstand the wear and tear of children, cutting out the pieces and staple gunning them to each cushion’s wooden base. Never much of a domestic aside from baking and doing crafts with my kids, it was one of the few home-improvement projects I undertook.

No one claimed the table – it was too big for any of us. I was going to a tiny one-bedroom apartment near Washington, D.C., Rick was going to a small apartment in Texas, Gemma was getting her first apartment as a post-graduate and Luke was getting an apartment with friends in college.

The table would go to our house’s new tenants or be sold.

I hadn’t originally planned on coming back to our Colorado home after going to Spain at the beginning of June for a month. I thought I might end up staying there but, as I suspected, I missed my kids too much to remain that far away at this time in their lives. So, still without a job after being DOGEd in February and not able to move into my apartment until August, I returned to Colorado to help pack up the rest of the house.

After the dining room we moved on to the library.

“What about the dogs?” Gemma asked. A gray ceramic urn and a little wooden box sat on the coffee table. They contained our first and second family pets, Jesse and Jackson (unintentional nod to THE Jesse Jackson).

“I think we should spread them in the yard,” I said.

Protests all around, especially from the boys. In my experience, males are far more sentimental than females, although I don’t think that’s the popular perception. I’m not sure why this is other than they seem to experience the passing of time with more melancholy. Mortality seems to loom like the heaviest of credenzas for them; maybe their DNA knows that their time on earth is shorter, which it is, statistically.

Artwork claimed with sticky notes for each of my children

“I’ll take them,” Rick said. “Well, you can have Wan,” he joked, referring to our goofy but lovable second dog, Jackson. As do many people with pets, we mutilated his name with affection. It morphed into Jackie, Jackie Chan, Chan, Channy Wanny and then, absurdly, Wan, which actually suited him because of the wan look that would randomly cross his face. The oddballness of Wan was a running joke in our house and among the neighborhood kids.

In the end, we decided that I would be the main curator of the remains, the same way that I was curator of all the boxes that contained mementos from Gemma’s and Luke’s childhoods: their schoolwork and artwork, their Christmas lists, the nasty or apologetic notes they wrote to each other, their yearbooks, sports medals and books. Rick purchased tiny pewter urns for him and the kids to take some of the ashes with them.

The library was divided as such: I would take the large bookcase because I had the most books, although I was skeptical it would fit through the door of my new apartment; Rick would take the leather couches, coffee table and rug; Luke would take the small bookcase; he and Gemma would split the artwork and we would draw straws over a stained-glass lamp.

While the dinner table went without claim, the breakfast table was different – Rick quickly snapped it up. It’s nothing special, an oak-finish four-seater from Kmart, yet somehow it seemed to be outlasting our 20-plus-year marriage. It was the first piece of furniture that we bought together, marked with the grooves of pens pressed too firmly, bumpy with translucent blobs of glue from craft projects and rubbed raw of its stain where plates, drinking glasses and elbows rubbed repeatedly.

It's funny how all things become repositories of memories. A factor in hoarding is that people feel emotionally connected to items or sentimental about the memories they represent. They feel a sense of security being surrounded by these things and just can’t let them go.

In only the most superficial sense was my family dividing things. What we were really doing was selecting memories, experiences and time, holding onto the familiar, a ballast as we are always in flow, ever changing, ever transitioning, ever gathering more things and their associated memories to take into uncertain futures that will be parsed again.