“I haven’t used this spoon to put sugar on my oatmeal since I was a little boy,” my dad said one morning some 35 years ago. Dad was staying with us the winter before he died and had evidently never noticed that I was using the old spoon I’d found in his mother’s stuff.

Since he’d been a little boy in about 1913 the spoon that I keep in my mother’s sugar bowl (a relic of my childhood making it some 70 years old) has been kicking around in the family for, well, a long time.

It’s not like we’re a family with rare antiques, things connected to significant historical events. A college boyfriend took me home to his 18th century stone house in Connecticut to meet his parents. The place was filled with family heirlooms: genuine early New England four-poster beds, old, old silver flatware that gleamed from a century of daily use. I was awestruck.

My own childhood home, furnished with 1950s-era stuff, had no gleaming patina of history. My mother, the only child of an orphaned mother and an immigrant father with a very modest Chicago Southside upbringing, wanted new. She kept Dad’s “heirlooms”, a rustic basket filled with Victorian-era silver-plate tchotchkes, hidden somewhere in the basement.

I use the basket to hold rag balls for my rugs, keep the spoon in the sugar bowl, and the rest of my grandmother’s “inheritance” hidden somewhere in the barn loft.

Except it’s not really a purposeful act of hiding, but rather what do I do with it, and all the other stuff I’ve deemed too significant to get rid of? I have a small box tucked away in a bureau drawer with little things that belonged to my mother, and another with Wally’s, like the lock of his hair I clipped the morning after he died.

My generation of young women still did the consumer version of the bridal trousseau, gathering the items a woman needed to set up housekeeping. We went to Marshall Fields (fill in the appropriate department store here) with our mothers and picked out “our” china pattern, the silver pattern, the stemware for our Bridal Registry, in the hopes that our wedding guests would give us a place setting. This is how we prepared for marriage.

And how did that work out for us?

Whether or not our marriages lasted until “death do us part” or if we ever did marry, most of us come to a day of reckoning with our worldly goods.The china we obsessively fretted over, this pattern or that one, the plates and cups and saucers, the elaborate vegetable serving bowl with the gilded handles, is gathering dust on the top shelf somewhere. We only took it out for “good”, maybe once or twice a year, and now not for decades. Of course, it’s valuable, isn’t it? Well no, it’s not. Ebay says it’s worth hundreds only no one’s buying it. The gilded edges mean it can’t go in the dishwasher, and besides, families today rarely sit down together even for a special meal. Entertaining is hardly formal these days.

Sometimes couples bicker over this cleaning out; a friend sneaks stuff out behind her husband’s back, another takes weekly loads to Heavenly Threads and Goodwill even as she brings new “finds” into her house. Some of us become out and out hoarders. One guy I knew had narrow paths through the piles of stuff leading to the chair he slept in, to the bathroom, and to whatever could still be found of his kitchen. And a woman living in a small trailer had covered virtually every surface with little china figurines; how on earth did she keep them all dusted, I wondered?

I, however, hoard for practical reasons, or so I tell myself. I pocket random bits of plastic or metal or shell that I find at the Beach, imagining someday using them in a pendant or other piece of jewelry. Except there are no jewels, just my own version of well, random stuff stitched together in a pleasing – to me – way.

I can show you my collections of white stuff, blue stuff, red stuff, etc. all neatly catalogued in little drawers I found somewhere. Then there are the fabric boxes, pieces of cloth too small to weave but too interesting to throw away, and also sorted by color.

Still, most of what I save, beyond what I may actually find a use for someday, is sentimental. It belonged to my parents, my brother or sister-in-law or a son gave it to me. Now there are grandchildren’s handmade gifts and cards tucked away or on display. The shoehorn Frank Slegona made, demonstrating his metalworking tools for me one day. That and the wooden spoon he carved from a chunk of apple wood.

I can tell my kids, who will one day have to go through all this stuff, the significance of these, but the emotions I feel don’t transfer to them. Things aren’t sentient beings; feelings belong to us.

When we reach the stage of unloading, downsizing from a family-sized house to a few rooms, to an RV or even a single room, we find photos of long-ago vacations, of birthdays and Christmases, hand-made gifts, your mother’s pineapple upside-down cake pan (well, mine). No wonder we find it hard to throw stuff away! A day spent sorting through it all leaves us either drained or invigorated, melancholy or gratified. Either way, we have to come to terms with our feelings.

Summer has become the season for graveside services, for memorial gatherings, for the celebration of lives. Easy and accessible cremation makes it possible to hold services at the convenience of far-flung families. Just this past week-end there were three here in Lincolnville, for Bob Collemore, Joan Masalin Ratliff, and Richard Glock, and a couple of weeks ago a church funeral for Adele Padden.

Since unlike a funeral held within days of a death, the first stages of grieving have often passed, and the person can be remembered, which is somewhat different than being mourned.  

Richard Glock’s four offspring spoke movingly and with humor of their father, producing a pile of mail that had accumulated at his house after he died. One by one they read off the many causes he’d supported as evidenced by his mail. They remembered the list of companies “we’re boycotting” that he kept on their fridge growing up. “He never lectured us on them, but would explain why if we asked.”

In the end it’s all about the memories. The thing, be it photo or cake pan, is only the vehicle that gets us there.

Pickleball

Note that the Intro to Pickleball (that’s held every Saturday at the town’s tennis courts at the school), is cancelled for this week only. Pickleball Beginners’ Open Play is still on, 8:30 to 9:30 a.m. Saturday. Intro resumes August 13.

Condolences

Sympathy to the family of Betty Beach who passed away at home last week. Betty was grandma to the four little boys living at Three Bug Farm; she and husband, Chris, moved to Lincolnville from western Maine to be near them a year or so ago.