Necessary Clutter
Not everything worth keeping has to be useful.
Cynthia Lord
The old teddy bear on the window seat is missing both eyes. His left leg is no longer attached to his body, and there’s a small hole under his right paw where the stuffing shows through. If he ever had a name, I’ve forgotten it.
Every couple of months or so, I go through cupboards and shelves and give away things I know I don’t need. I don’t like clutter, and love the satisfaction of handing over bags stuffed with clothes, ornaments, shoes and plates to the man at the charity shop. The teddy bear will never be in one of those bags.
My mother was still in the maternity ward a week after I was born. It was Valentine’s Day, and my father arrived with a gift, the teddy bear. Mom loved to tell the story, how she thought the gift was for her. She’d pretend to be indignant, and Dad would smile.
On a chair next to the window seat is a cushion my mother embroidered in her twenties. When I run my fingers over the stitches, I imagine her hands threading the needle, making each tiny petal and leaf. My grandmother’s old copper kettle sits on a shelf in my kitchen. The kettle is missing its element; it’s no longer useful for boiling water. But it catches the light in the evenings and reminds me of her cool kitchen on summer afternoons.
Today’s poem, by Barbara Kingsolver, is a reminder that beloved objects are often imbued with memory and relationship.
Thank-You Note for a Quilt For Neta Webb Findlay, 1920-2018 Your stitches still remind me of beans in May: their bowed heads emerging in perfect rows. Or blackberry canes that arch and fall, marching across the hayfield between my house and yours, quietly stitching our neighbourhood into one grassy quilt for the crows to name. When you were a child planting lilacs here with your mother, did you imagine the same honeyed scent, eighty years later, waking someone like me in the house, or that we would sit on this porch stitching and binding together, or that you would finally show me how to fall in love with the time on my hands, to plant flowers to outlive me? This quilt is more than one of your winters, a falling-leaves pattern passed down. It is the bed I am still making up under blackberry winters come and gone. The grace of passing over, passing on. by Barbara Kingsolver With wishes for a beautiful week, and time to appreciate the precious things that are a necessary clutter in your home, Carri. The poem is from Barbara Kingsolver's collection, "How to Fly (In Ten Thousand Easy Lessons)."