My mother’s things have become unknown to me. They have become the stuff of archeology. By this I mean that each individual object’s history is lost in her absence. These things that once had the potential to prompt intimate and unknown stories from the recesses of my mother’s memory are now foreign artifacts whose stories are left for me to uncover and interpret (or invent). There is no longer a “native” user, a historical insider, to tell me that this yellow scrap of fabric is torn from the belt my mother bought in 12th grade, her favorite belt, that she wore until it was broken and tattere, or that it was the belt she was wearing when her first boyfriend first kissed her, or when she met my father, or when she graduated from college . . . And that this is the reason there is one lonely, seemingly useless, scrap of yellow fabric at the bottom of her bottom drawer. My sister and I have become the maternal history-keepers, the weavers of my mother’s secret, object-centered narratives.
That said, we have yet to comb through her things. It’s revisiting, reinventing these personal narratives - each object telling of a daily life that no longer exists - that daunts me. It has just as yet been too painful, too sour, to bare. So all my mother’s clothes are where she left them, her desk drawers full of bits of paper with scrawling hieroglyphics only she could decipher, her underwear drawer full to the brim - the last describing the most daily and most intimate of clothing rituals. But it’s necessary, finally, to move on. I feel like I should undertake this work like that of an archeologist, carefully cataloging each thing, marking out the location where it was found, carefully storing it for shipping and later examination and interpretation (ie. this is the heart-encrusted pencil she last used to write my name, this is the ratty black dress with a singular appliqued rose that she wore for chores on the weekends, this is the sweater she started to knit for me 20 years ago and never managed to finish . . .).
And these Things take on an unexpectedly greater importance, as if I could piece her back together from these disparate artifacts. As if these varied and insignificant objects (bobby pins, nylons, paintbrush, single sock) could somehow summon her and make her real to me once more. Like the sweater for which this blog is named. It’s as if the Things become the ashes of her material life. The shadows of each of her actions. Actions which, in turn, describe her lovely identity. The Things become bodily resonances, evidence of her being. And that’s why, by the time I sort through the Things, I will have waited nearly two years since her death.