Welcome home

I’ve moved, and I’m coming to you from the new apartment in the city. It’s a one bedroom on the ground floor of a twentieth-century yellow brick building on the corner. My bedroom looks out on the alley. All the contents of the apartment (with the exception of a shower curtain and some dish soap) are from my mother’s house: even the food in the fridge and cabinets I took from hers. She left me a spectacular collection of antiques and vintage tchotchkes, including the radios and posters, not to mention the furniture and rugs and kitchen appliances (ice cream maker, pressure cooker, standing mixer, wok…) and coffee-table books.

It’s all dross, to quote a certain saint in translation. It wasn’t worth my mother’s life. It’s a bunch of vintage junk she picked up here and there in her travels, each one a memory. I inherited a wooden airplane propeller and a set of hand-spun pottery plates and bowls. I have the afghans and table cloths her mother made. It’s all just random stuff.

It’s her random stuff. The particular this-ness of the things is her: it’s this ash tray, not any other; this tea set, not another; this croquet set which sat in the basement of the old house except that one time I dragged it out to play, except none of us know how to play croquet so we just hit the balls around.

So it’s both: random stuff, and her stuff. It’s not her. It is her. Every piece of it is a facet of her personality, because she left herself in it by chosing to keep it: the table I’m sitting at was dragged back and forth across the Atlantic just because she liked it. Most of this stuff was in her life longer than I was.

But the other day I read an anecdote about Turing in his biography that I wanted to share with her because she was the only one who would get it (would you believe that I’ve forgotten what it was?), and for the first time I truly grieved her. Because I had always taken her for granted: Mommy was always there, sometimes a little too there. And now she’s nowhere. Or everywhere. Or right here. I miss her, even in the midst of her.