Some Day We’ll Make History

I’m 57 years old and nobody cares what my ACT score was. Including me. Which made the results an easy toss into the shred box during the Great Hampton Street Purge of 2022-2023.

We moved my elderly dad out of his house into a memory care unit in July of 2022. It took almost another full year to clear out his home on Hampton Street and sell it. I can’t tell you how many boxes we hauled to the thrift store or garbage bags we dragged to the driveway or dumpsters we filled. I can tell you how many shredders we went through: three.

Was it hard? Yes. His house was 370 miles away from where we live so going there each month took planning, time, and money. Our clean-up crew was largely Jeremy and I, with occasional help from Brian, the neighbor across the street, and my best friend, Lynnette, who’d drive down from the Cities when she could. And there was just so much stuff, from four generations of our family, and because it was all mixed together, we couldn’t randomly toss things out for fear of trashing some document or family heirloom that needed to be kept.

Our family history, including my own, was packed into a ranch-style house, three garage stalls, and a metal storage shed. And we emptied it. All of it. I still wonder if I did it right.

When it’s your turn, if it hasn’t been already, this is what I want you to know:

Every family has secrets. They’ll reveal themselves through letters, pictures, cards, newspaper clippings, official documents, artwork, and random notes stuffed in Bibles, boxes, and drawers. Not all secrets are bad. Some are enlightening and may actually help you make sense of some family dynamics that you couldn’t quite figure out over the years.

Sometimes stuff is just…stuff. Your family likely worked hard for the things they had and tried to build the best home they could, for their generation and the generations to follow. Not everything is worth keeping, it just isn’t, and when you’re looking to sell things, most of it won’t have the value you think it does. Use your head AND your heart. Great grandma’s handmade quilt should go to a family member who’ll appreciate it. Three shelves of mismatched Tupperware can go to the dumpster.

Let it go. If you’re currently the keeper of family historical items and your kids are adults who have homes and families of their own, consider handing down those items now. You’re not just passing down the heirloom itself, you’re telling the story behind it and why it matters to your family. That’s how family histories go on. If the current generation gets it after someone dies or succumbs to a disease that robs their memory, they have no context to relate things to. And they’ll end up passing down boxes with photos that say “Aunt Pearl and some guy” on the back because they don’t know the story or the people. Pass the items down now, see them displayed in your kids’ homes, and know that your family history will live on after you’re gone.

Rediscover who you are. If you’re one of those people who had your life planned out since you were six and everything is going exactly as planned, I applaud you. With sincerity not sarcasm. I’ve strayed from the path I thought I was on many times over the years, even veered off the road and into the ditch a couple of times. When you’re unearthing the mysteries of your family during a purge, look for clues about yourself, too. In cleaning out my Dad’s house, I found reference letters and notes and awards and newspaper clippings from my life from birth through college that were pretty good reminders that there were people who believed I would do amazing things with my life. Sometimes when we get older, we need to be reminded of that once in a while.  

Roll with the emotions. Sorting out generations of your family history and deciding what happens with it is emotional. You’ll laugh, cry, swear, scream, throw up your hands in frustration – and that’s just while emptying out the dresser in the guest room. Life is a rollercoaster of emotions every day and when you’re purging a house, it’s life you’re sorting out. Let it all out.

I kept a few things from this experience, things that probably won’t mean anything to anyone else in my family. I don’t have kids to pass them down to but I’ll have them with me until I go, to remind me that this is who I come from and this is who I am. It’s worth the work to know that.

One of the items I kept from one of the people I most respected in my life.

Peace and Perseverance

My sister, Great-Grandma Christine, and me on our last visit

My Great-Grandma Christine was a small, slightly stooped woman who talked in a soft Southern drawl and wore house dresses and hand-knitted cardigans. She was almost 70 when I was born and nearly 90 when she passed away in 1986.

She raised 10 kids in an unpainted wooden house that didn’t have an indoor bathroom until her sons came home from World War II and Korea and built their parents one as an anniversary present. It did have a porch swing, and on Sunday evenings at dusk we’d swing on it with Great-Grandma and watch the long line of traffic on the highway from Myrtle Beach to Pamplico. People heading home from a weekend at the beach, she said.

We saw Great-Grandma Christine every summer when we went to South Carolina to visit our Dad’s family. Growing up, I knew my Great-Grandma loved music, liked flowers, cooked good low country food, gave heartfelt hugs, and had the most beautiful smile.

I met her again, a few days ago, 37 years after her death.

Her eulogy was in the pile of paperwork I’ve been sorting through as we clean out my Dad’s house. I’ve been a eulogist twice. It’s hard, not only because of the circumstances but because of the duty you have to get it right, to tell the truth about the person you’re remembering. I don’t know who delivered her eulogy but they certainly got it right.

The two simple pages contained many wonderful memories about Great-Grandma but there are two passages that I will carry forward with me. The first is as relevant in our world today as it was in her lifetime:

“Christine Poston had the serenity of a woman at peace with the world and in the world. In the midst of violence and hatred, pain and suffering, she said we should choose the path of peacemaker, and that the world is a place to which you and I owe peace.”

The second is proof that we all have the power if we choose to use it:

“When she first took piano lessons, she couldn’t afford a piano so had nothing to practice on. So she went home, found a piece of board, and painted the white and black keys on it…then listened to the music in her mind and played it on that old board, her fingers walking across the wood. How the angels must have danced across the stages of her mind to the music that whirled in her thoughts that the rest of the world didn’t hear but that to Miss Christine came alive on that wooden board piano.”

What stops us from being the people we could be? Maybe we think we don’t have what we need to do it. Maybe that’s because we’re not looking in the right place – we’re looking out when we should be looking in. I’m glad Great-Grandma Christine reminded me of that.

Tick, tick, tick…BOOM!

The day I turned 30, the longest margarita bar in Las Vegas was closed. Not in my honor but because the ice machines had broken down.

My expectation had been that my 30^th birthday would be a milestone to remember, as much as it could be once I drank my way down the longest margarita bar in Vegas. The reality was much less exciting.

Milestone birthdays are meant to mark turning points in our lives. At five, you’re off to kindergarten. At 16, you get a driver’s license. At 21, you can legally drink alcohol. You expect these milestones to be joyous occasions and generally, they are. But not always.

When I turned five, my grandparents were on their way to my birthday party when they were hit head-on by a drunk driver. They spent months recovering from their injuries.

My friend Jason turned 21 on 9/11 – THE 9/11. There was no big party.  

When my husband Jeremy turned 30, the limo we were taking to his birthday celebration hit a deer. The driver was so shaken, he wanted to turn back and go home.

Big expectations. Real disappointments.

It isn’t just us that have expectations for these milestones; the world around us expects something from us, too. By 30, you should be partnered up with someone, if not married. By 40, you have your own home. By 50, you’re firmly established in your career. By 60, you’re surrounded by grandkids and planning for a fabulous retirement. Nothing like a little pressure.

My current circle of friends contains a number of people celebrating milestone birthdays, mostly 50 and 60. But one of them recently turned 30 and was initially less than excited to celebrate. While she’s meeting her personal goals and is happy with her life as it stands right now, society was insinuating that she was falling short of where she should be at 30. She clearly isn’t and since she just started her 30^th year, who knows where she’ll be at 31?

Do our lives really have such strict schedules? Should they? We all need goals to move us forward but isn’t it up to US to set them? And it’s our prerogative as to when the deadlines, the milestones, should be. The only deadline we don’t really have a say in is our own death.

I turned 56 this past weekend. I have a husband, a dog, a mortgage, a job that doesn’t always suck, and a small but amazing circle of friends. Is my life what I thought it would be by this age? No. But then, I’m not done living it yet, am I?

Are you hitting your personal milestones as you get older? If not, how do you feel about that?

“What of the books?” she cried.

I was seven in 1973 when I got Robert Louis Stevenson’s “Treasure Island” for Christmas. It was the Golden Classics Library edition, hardcover, with the title embossed in gold on the spine. Santa didn’t skimp on reading material that year. I also got “Heidi’s Children” and my older sister scored “Little Women” and “Tales of Edgar Allan Poe.” We were, and still are, eclectic readers.

I grew up thinking a book was one of the most valuable things you could own. They came from everywhere: as gifts, from bookstores, rummage sales, library surplus, friend exchanges. We were rich indeed, with stacks and shelves of books everywhere. In our eagerness to dive into a new book, we didn’t really pay attention to how many we actually had – until it was time to do something with them.

We’ve started cleaning out my Dad’s house in anticipation of moving him to the city where I live, and at first, sifting through all of those books was nostalgic.

“Oh, I LOVED this book!” “I remember exactly how this one ended.” “I always wondered whatever happened to that book.”

Then the piles got taller and the boxes heavier, and the moment wasn’t so magical any more.

I never intended to be that person who had too many books. In fact, in recent years, my personal book collection has actually gotten smaller, due in part to a Kindle I swore I’d never use.

“I’m a purist!” I declared, when friends gushed about their e-readers. “The feel of the paper, the turned back corners marking my spot, the cracks in the binding of a well-read tome. THAT’S what book reading is all about!”

Then my friend, Nancy, gave me her old Kindle so I had something to read when I was in the hospital for my stem cell transplant. And it turned out to be a lot easier to throw that in my pack than a stack of paperbacks.

I’ve weaned down my own book collection by distributing them to reading friends, donating to book drives, adding to the collections of little free libraries on street corners. Some that couldn’t be salvaged went into the garbage. I never thought I’d throw away a book; in the old days, I would have just slapped on some duct tape and kept reading.

We’ve been less successful disposing of the years of reading material at my Dad’s house. The thrift stores where he lives have so many books, they won’t accept boxes full, the book drives seem few and far between, and the little free libraries I’ve found there are overflowing.

So where are they supposed to go? For now, each time I visit him, a few more make it home with me.

One of them was “Treasure Island” which I read again, just for the hell of it. It’s still a great book although as I read it as an adult, I suspected I probably didn’t understand very much of it as a 7-year-old. Good thing it had those lurid 1970’s illustrations so I could follow the story. Don’t get those in the Kindle version, boys and girls.

Do you have a plethora of books you’re trying to get rid of? What are you doing with them?