Watching my life packed into boxes has been less nauseating than I expected, but there’s still the attic to tackle. Where there was artwork next to vining plants and tchotchkes from my years of travel arranged atop antique furniture, there are now drab cardboard moving boxes. It’s sobering to see just how insignificant a home really is when it’s disassembled. Truly just a collection of things that mean something to someone who - unless it’s your house - is not you.
My son and daughter, more well-off than I ever hoped, have hired something of a team to manage this process. They felt it would be less affecting to me, and let’s be honest: them, if strangers carefully took apart my life and bubble wrapped it away.
What everyone knows and isn’t acknowledging is that I will likely never unpack any of these boxes again. This is a nice gesture, to package it all up sweetly as if it will fit in my new one person “condo,” which is likely just a dorm room with my own bathroom. I’ll probably just get two boxes of essentials and a few pieces of decor that’ll suit the new space, and the rest will go into a storage unit to be huffed and puffed over when I’m gone.
How does one contain ninety-four years in these drab boxes? How is there enough bubble wrap in the world to safely store a lifetime of unbreakable memories?
I’m almost too old to be sentimental. If there’s anything I’ve learned in three recessions, four natural disasters, two presidential coups, and a house fire, it’s that all this is just stuff. All that matters are the stories.
When everyone seems preoccupied arguing over the piano, I steal away to the rickety ladder that leads to the attic. My son has made it clear he’d prefer I don’t climb it anymore, but we both know I was never one to heed a man’s advice.
I used to say that the attic is where memories go to die, and when I look around, I laugh at what a graveyard it is up here. Boxes with their contents scrawled across their sides like headstones; chairs and frames covered in sheets, likely still decomposing underneath; a few figurines and statuettes and an old plastic Santa peer at me from the menagerie of junk.
Some boxes belong to the children, to my more recent life. There are holiday decorations and photo albums, boxes of journals in which are drafted my life’s work. Who knows what will happen to these and the secrets they hold when I’m gone.
There are also suitcases, way more than any normal person would use for trips. Old ones, outdated and cumbersome and often a wild aesthetic. I used to tell my children these were magic cases, before they had their own credit cards and airline miles and could travel for themselves. I got the idea from a book once to keep a snapshot of the worlds you’ve known so you can revisit them whenever you want.
Each of them has their destination decoupaged in some fashion across the sides. Austria, Denmark, Portugal, Morocco, Ethiopia, Kazakhstan, Mongolia, Siberia, Vietnam, there are nearly thirty cases for almost twenty years spent exploring the world.
I try to move a couple to unearth another and they were apparently made for a stronger, younger me to handle, and I cease the struggle before it frustrates me. I can’t say I’m looking for anything in particular, just browsing as if I window shopping the collection at a stranger’s boutique.
In pushing around the cases, I find a fairly light one, smaller and shaped more like a hat box than a suitcase. It’s old, one of my earlier attempts and not as refined as my later collections. The side reads, Aix-en-Provence. My heart skips a beat.
I bring the case over to the window and brush the dust off the lid gingerly into the light. The particles scatter like glitter. I lift the lid and realize that this is the first time I’ve opened this case since I created it. This one was never a bedtime story for the children or a courting story for my husband. I never impressed anyone with the construction of this case or wowed cocktail party guests with retellings of my time there.
Two years, in my mid-twenties, but I remember as if it were yesterday.
Inside the box are postcards, some with writing and some without, bought just for the pretty illustration on the front. There are train tickets, a receipt for breakfast at Aubencafe that includes deux pain au chocolate and deux cappuccinos handwritten and paid for in cash. There is a napkin with a handwritten note that I turn over, not willing to replay the words in my mind.
There are linens; a soft lingerie top with lace everywhere that matters, a napkin from a higher-end restaurant I couldn’t normally afford back then, and a pillowcase embroidered with the name of an inn, chambres d'hotes La Ferme, where I spent countless weekends during that time.
And, there’s a coffee mug. I look inside and it still has a whisper of a coffee in a ring around the bottom. It’s not a shapely thing, an early piece in an artist’s career given as a prize to a loved one so close. It has a handle but it’s a bit bent, fired into place anyway because done is better than perfect. She used to say that.
On the bottom, reads a small inscription I couldn’t avoid even if I threw the cup across the room. I know it by heart. I see it written one every surface in my dreams. I always have.
“The first of many. With love, Noémie”
As unsentimental as I have become in my old age, this is too much. My eyes are wet with hot tears and my chest is constricted like a heart attack. I wish it were.
I kept this box hidden for so many years, my special secret I couldn’t let anyone take or add commentary to or ruin. I kept it hidden, not because I was ashamed of this tryst, no. Because of the handwritten note, because of the consequences of fate, because I never went back for her.
Now, it is just me. My husband is gone, rest his soul. My children are grown with their own drama to attend. And I am just a few cardboard boxes from the end of my life as I know it, packed away into a home where I will be politely watched and buttoned up in the cold and prepared to die.
Regret washes over me in waves, but I feel the lace in between my fingers and I am back there, the smell of lilacs blooming in the vase by the window, staying at her parents' inn in the countryside and drinking coffee out of that misshapen, made-with-love coffee mug. I place the lid back on the box.
When my daughter sees me backing down the attic ladder with the hatbox hanging by its braided rope handle from my elbow, she gasps and runs to my aid. It’s a sweet gesture, but it still annoys me.
“Mama, what is that?”
“Where have you been?”
“I’ve told you I don’t like you going up and down that rickety old ladder. It needs to be replaced…”
I sigh, “Are you two on top of things here? I need to take a short drive.”
They both look incredulous. “Yes, we’re fine here but where do you have to go right now?”
As if because I’m old all of my interests and intent to be productive have evaporated. “I’m taking my laptop to the coffee shop. I have someone I’d like to find.”
