What precious possessions would you choose to take with you if you had to flee a house fire?
My mother was a child of the 1930’s Depression. Later, as an adult, she lost everything in a house fire except the clothes she was wearing at the time. Perhaps not surprisingly, possessions became terribly important to her. When she died, I found cupboards stacked with shoes and clothes, linen and crockery, far more than any one person could need.
As a result of her hoarding, I am the opposite. I would give anything away. So it’s gone? So what? Did I really need it?
(…though if you’re the person who borrowed my DVD of the Russian movie, ‘The Admiral’, could you please return it!)
The other day, as I stood at the kitchen bench making a sandwich for lunch, I tried to decide what possessions I truly vaued? What would I snatch if I had to escape my own house fire?
Photograph albums? Probably not. I travelled around Europe for three months in the eighties taking photographs with my little Cannon camera only to arrive home and discover the battery had been flat the whole time and I had 23 roles of blank film!
And yet that trip through France, Italy, Yugoslavia and Greece is still as fresh in my mind as if it happened yesterday. The fountain at Saint Michel as I stepped out of the Paris Metro for the first time. The frosty Spring mornings, the flower markets. In Venice the convent with the frescoed ceiling and walls where I stayed for $5.00 a night. The man I met in Florence. Cruising the Cycladic Islands.
My memory is better than any photographs preserved in an album.
No point saving my computer. These days everything is stored in the clouds. Passport? Birth certificates? All replaceable. My library of books? Which would I choose? And would I have time? No, they’re replaceable too.
For a moment I considered this icon. My husband and I found it in Poland, although it originally came from Ukraine and dates back to the late 1800’s. It inspires lovely memories of searching through shops in the backstreets of Krakow, but I quickly decided it would not break my heart if I had to live without it.
Then my eyes came to rest on this painting. Yes, I thought, that’s what I’d take, that is precious to me!
It’s not the monetary value of the painting–in fact it cost barely $20.00 in a shop not far from the Cathedral in Wroclaw that it depicts. While staying with my sister-in-law, Sophie, I expressed a desire to hear the choir at St John the Baptist Cathedral. After we left the church, it began to rain and I slipped on the cobblestones. And that tiny experience became a poem that I’ve taped to the back of the painting.
So it’s not the object itself that’s important but the memory evoked by the object? It’s people we need, not possessions. Perhaps I’ve been too hard on my mother. Perhaps each of her possessions held special memories for her too. I hope they did.
Yes Suzanne, I am hard on my mother but for different reasons. If my home burnt down and all my possessions perished, I would still hold my many unanswered questions about my mother in my heart and memory. They are both unanswerable and inescapable.
However, I would take my very much loved pearls. They were given to me when I was about twenty-two by a young man who was born in Lithuania. After the upheavals and dangers of WW11 in Europe, displaced persons camps and a voyage as refugees to Australia, he and his family were placed in Bonegilla camp in NE Victoria. Long story but they made happy and productive lives here in Melbourne and lived to veery old age. All his mother left her home in Lithuania with was one Faberge spoon. A token of her former life. It lived in the kitchen drawer amongst the other cutlery which used to amuse me.
You are right about it is the memories we take with us. Two of my boyfriends went to the Vietnam War. One came home minus two legs and one arm, the other came home minus his reason. He never truly recovered. So these small stories show us that war is truly a root of evil and children who are damaged and dislocated by war should be given a safe home here in Australia. BRING THEM HERE!
Why do so many of us leave it too late to ask our parents the important questions? I hear people say it again and again and I was certainly guilty of it myself. And then they’ve gone and it is too late… Your memories about the young men brought tears to my eyes…in such ways are lives made. I can’t help wanting to know more about all of them. Perhaps they are short stories just waiting to be written…’The Faberge Spoon’…what a great title… And as for bringing the children here…I despair that the Four Corners program about the children suffering on Nauru should become the object of such hostility instead of cause for change. How did it come to this…?