Treasures in Grandparents' Closets
Home, objects, and time capsules
Hi Friends,
This week I have been reflecting on the notion of home. The origins of where we come from, lineage, home as a place we know from childhood, and create to our preferences as adults. In Maya Angelou’s, Letter to My Daughter, there is an essay on home where she writes, “I believe that one can never leave home. I believe that one carries the shadows, the dreams, the fears and dragons of home under one’s skin, at the extreme corners of one’s eyes and possibly in the gristle of the earlobe.”
My family recently moved my grandmother out of her home, a home I visited many times as a child and throughout my life. Her home was a container of sorts for family history, a time capsule, and in many ways it didn’t change over the past several decades. It was a house I could visit and look forward to seeing each object in its same place, steady and routined just like her, against the backdrop of an ever-changing life. Her house was a cabinet of curiosities. Every object in the house had sentimental value, a reflection of her own sentimental nature.
As a child, I loved exploring the closets in both of my grandparents’ homes. Closets felt like a wonderland of odd things, objects that on some level represent what cannot be dealt with or used in the present, but what must be stowed away to be organized, used, or given away at a later date. It’s a space for accumulation, of time passed and perhaps, preparation for time to come.
Imagine having a grandchild who took no greater pleasure than to go through your closet! Treasures, only treasures to be found that smell of mothballs and times passed. There is no privacy when you have a voracious and curious granddaughter.
