The catalog of a life in knickknacks | Ammi Midstokke
Every time I visit my grandmother, Marge, she offers me treasures from her life, as if she knows she is readying for a journey upon which they cannot be carried. This house that was once a symbol of the American Dream and fiscal responsibility and scraping the last molecules of butter off the dish (for they were also children of the Depression), is beginning to echo with premature goodbyes.
I ask for the story of each item, and recognize it loses value for me if she cannot remember.
“Who did this ring belong to?” I ask of a tarnished filigree ring with a single, microscopic pearl set into tiny claws.
“I have no idea,” she says, disappointing my ancestral fantasies, for nothing has more meaning to me than the story. The thing itself, precious metal or otherwise, is just a trinket. I also have in my collection of forgotten histories a wedding ring so small, it barely fits on my pinky. One needs a magnifying glass to see the diamond set into it, and I imagine the person who insisted their bride-to-be have a stone in her ring, and if she felt some measurable joy at catching the glimmer of glitter there.
She gives me: a gold and pink cancer awareness brooch, a necklace with opal, an opal ring with stones missing, a silver bracelet with her name on it that says, “Love Mom and Dad,” a bracelet of plastic shells on an elastic band, the pearl ring, and a harmonica. She says she will give me the Japanese plate, the one inset with gold bamboo and a certificate from the artist, but I have to wait until she is gone. It sits on her sideboard in the living room, next to a clock that stopped working years ago. She bought the plate on a trip to Japan that I don’t remember her taking.
The next morning, she tells me, “I’ve thought about it, and you can have the plate now.” I don’t want it yet though, because I am resisting the emptying of her house. Once filled with knickknacks, each carefully placed on shelves, in cabinets, on walls, a kind of Table of Contents to the stories of her life, it is becoming strangely sparse.
Each shelf has one item, so as not to be useless. The rich ferns and ivies that draped and curtained all manner of bay window have been replaced with succulents and sad cacti. The crystal is gone, the nice dishes, the cups reserved for the grandkids. The upstairs is a retired ward of the home, a place we bring back to life when we visit, because she does not climb the stairs anymore. Instead, she does PT: getting in and out of a chair without using her hands, 20 times a day. She’s working on her balance, because at 95, she knows a broken hip may mean the self-appointed wardens of her life swoop in and demand she move to an assisted living facility.
I think she’d rather the house burn down around her. I find myself eyeing her with suspicion when she tells me the chimney isn’t swept well, but there’s no need for me to sweep it, like she is tempting fate. But Marge is too responsible for such a thing, and this makes me think of that value in entirely different terms than I hear it used today.
If one had to define this woman in a single word, that may be it, responsible. She is from a small town in Wisconsin, went to college in the late 1940s, became a school teacher – third and fourth grade – and retired in 1986. Sometime around then, she also quit smoking, because my granny (her partner) had a heart attack in 1984 that forever changed their relationship with egg yolks and cigarettes. Granny still snuck cigarettes when we grandkids visited and stressed her out – I found the butts in the toilet bowl sometimes – but Marge was more responsible.
She says she doesn’t want to be a burden to anyone, but then she gave up driving on her own recently, concerned she might make a mistake or have a health incident that could cause her to crash into someone else. That would, of course, be irresponsible.
It’s the same with the systematic cleaning-out of the closets and drawers. When Granny died over a decade ago, Marge grieved through her sense of responsibility by purging cabinets. Granny collected things as symbols of her life. Once, she gave me the charm bracelet of her daughter, dangling with all the places of wonder she’d been before she died of leukemia at 18. I was too young then to realize the importance of the gift, and now hold the silver charms and try to pray the stories out of them. What is the memory linked to the doll-sized sewing machine?
Marge said she didn’t want anyone else to have the responsibility to clean out the house after she was gone, so she took carload after carload of stories to the thrift store, and didn’t bother to attach a description with each item. So the people who bought the crocheted toilet paper covers the shape of a dress will never know about the neighbor who made them for charity.
Marge points out a giant cross-stitch hanging on the wall and framed like a painting. It has no white space in it. From corner to corner, it is thousands of stitches in dozens of colors, a bouquet of peonies spilling out of a vase. There must be months of work put into such a thing. It reminds me of tapestries hanging in the Vatican.
As a young woman, Marge was visiting a cousin of hers who lived in Canada. The old woman in the apartment above hers had made this picture and gave it to Marge, because she thought it would be amazing to have a piece of her work hanging in America. It’s hard for me to imagine a time when we were a country of such hope and promise that others would seek invisible strings of relevance. This is why stories matter. They can serve as reminders to what was possible, what could still be.
I take furious notes when I visit, as if I am trying to catalogue species before they are extinct, but it is hopeless. When she is gone, I will still be left with so many unanswered questions, and wonder why I never asked about her trip to Japan.
Ammi Midstokke can be contacted at ammim@spokesman.com.