Relic

The destination of my pilgrimage had shifted from Lindisfarne to the family home, a blue cape cod on Sylvan Avenue—the first street in what became a massive suburban development in Queensbury that laid waste to woods in its wake.  “She had a hard life,” said a woman I met once on a plane.  I must have told her about Mom’s hip break and gone on to review her life from the time she was widowed at age 50.  She never remarried.  Never even dated.  “How could I?” was always her comeback.  She took care of her parents as they aged and died.  Her children left physically and some left emotionally, too.  Her response:  fill the house, every inch, pack it tight (Mom was a genius at packing), finding little spaces for everything she couldn’t let go of, things precious and potentially necessary to someone someday.  In her house, nothing was lost; and while she lived, no one was permitted to order the chaos.  “I know where everything is,” she’d say, even when she really didn’t.  For years we’d been moving piles of newspapers and magazines off the kitchen chairs so there would be room for guests on feast days.  “Just put it down by the washer.”  “If not there, then, there’s room in the bathtub upstairs.”  We even used a junk car, the 77 Olds for storage, as well as our greenhouse that was rotting in the back yard by the fence.  We, her children, always obeyed.  For years we carried piles of stuff round and round, looking for places to put it.  We had been immobilized artifacts and ephemera--history--and spoke of the furniture and collectibles as if they were sacred.  Perhaps that is why neither of my siblings who lived near Mom had made any effort to clean the house in the eighteen months between her fall and her eventual death.  “It” was too “overwhelming.”  Yes.  They have jobs and lives.  Yes.  But there was more to it:  the stuff Mom collected was imbued with sacredness.  How could she have trusted me with the job of handling the “tangibles,” disbursing them, unsettling all that was sacred in what was to some eyes is an antique store and to others is a hoarder house?  When I arrived and began the work, sure enough, every piece had a talisman-like power to lead my mind back through the years to gone worlds and once dear places:  the northern mountains, the southern pine barrens and across the Atlantic.  There was garnet from the North Creek mines, hunks of slag that looked like meteorites from Batsto, jars of shells and grains of beach sand, a paper mache coal mine with a balsam wood elevator, grade school stories corrected by her, machines to bunch asparagus, railroad lanterns, pictures of the Yorkshire Dales and ruined abbeys, and even her high school scrap book.  Nothing lost but me.

On the drive from Michigan, I was reading about the cult of relics in medieval Europe, and, like any pilgrim, I felt I was going to Mom’s house (her shrine) to be in the presence of an invisible person.  Relics that turned up were thought to do so by the grace of God and were understood to be messages to the pilgrim from the beyond.

First day of the cellar clean-out, the dump truck arrived and up came the boxes full of children’s clothes.  I recognized each outfit, and it was hard to let them go.  But the dump truck was there to be filled.  College books.  Luggage smelling of mildew.  College books.  Buddhism.  The Turko-Grecian War.  Hurry, hurry, time is money.  “Throw it,” “You can’t keep that,” “They are mildewed.”  “No baby clothes.”  Pressure to look fast and discard.  A box came up with another box on top.  It was black with swirls of color.  Thin enough to have held stockings, lingerie, sets of pocket hankies.  Too pretty not to open.  I stopped long enough to read the fine print:  “Barton’s.”  It was a chocolate box, and when I opened it, I was stunned.  

There was a faded old photograph that captured, even with a quick look, joy beneath gray layers of time.  The reflection of the flash was a bright spot still shining in the window behind the kitchen table.  A family group sat around a table sharing a watermelon.  The women held up their pieces.  The table was covered with an oilcloth.  I flipped it over, and, miracle of miracles, the people were named!  There was Uncle Frank (my mother’s favorite).  He is visibly happy.  I can see the ring on his left finger and his striped trousers or maybe that’s the long dress worn by Cornelia Grawe (who must be cousin Mildred’s mother).  Frank wears a suit and tie, and the women are wearing the high collared blouses of the late nineteenth century.  Their dark hair is swept back and pinned up.  My great grandmother, Kate Wescoat, is sixth from the left.  She is young—no babies yet.  I know she married Philip Wescoat in 1900, and so the photo must have been taken around the turn of the century.  The photo speaks to me of the joy of living in an extended family.  The pleasure of sitting down together for a simple meal—just a watermelon.  Even when I was a kid, my Jersey relatives had such meals.  If we visited Grandmother Walker (born a Wescoat) in the early summer, we’d have meals of strawberry shortcake.  In their world, strawberry shortcake was not dessert.  Ruth Wescoat made big casseroles of fluffy biscuit, and the red red juices of strawberries layered with whipped cream filled us up.  Whatever fruit was in season was always the main dish. 

I knew instantly that this photo would be my best find, my relic, and I found it on the first day of a week-long clean-out.  I felt sure it was a message from my mother (historian and saint).  Who else could have nudged me or turned my attention to that chocolate box that contained a photo about the real sweets available in this world?  I posted it to Facebook with the wish that my Mama had rejoined her family group at such a table in the world we mortals cannot see. 

But the real message is for the living.  Four of us, four children, grew up in Mom’s crowded house, and, despite the fact that she bought things in triplicate, there is a sick feeling of competition, as if there is not enough to go around.  It’s possible that Mom was too much the historian, too much the teacher, leaving each child with needs for attention and affirmation that went unsatisfied.  Four rooms.  Two girls (13 months apart) had to share a room for there to be enough space; and one now resents that, resents that she wasn’t treated as a separate individual.  As we matured, each adult child wanted Mom for themselves, claimed her, sought to be her favorite.  Even though I shared the watermelon photo, Jennifer had to see the original and clearly wants to possess it for herself.  Where does this capitalism of the heart come from?  What experiences feed into a belief that the essences of life can be seized and hoarded, that you can corner the market on love, stage a hostile takeover of history or happiness?  It’s based on scarcity economics, the notion or perhaps the feeling that there’s not enough to go around, and the belief that these intangible phenomena exist in a fixed quantity to be scrambled for, rather than that you can only increase them by giving them away.

Antique Salt Water Taffy Box / Inside was Mom's hair

It's as if she just stepped off the beach or climbed down from a tractor after plowing a field

Medieval saints were often exhumed and some found to be incorrupt.  Their books, shoes, jewelry, and even their bodies were taken as relics.  Days after the clean-out I dreamed of objects unearthed, objects appearing.  Shirley Temple in her original box.  Her white dress is stiff with age and dust, and her eyes rolled back are yellowed.  Open an ancient looking Fralinger salt water taffy box to find my mother’s honey-colored pigtails still soft and bright.  Open the box.  Open the box.  What would my mother look like now?  In my dream, I opened a box to find her body changed:  skin like brown-black leather and fingers like sticks.  And even in the dream, my siblings and I quarreled over her mummified remains.

But the relic photo has an urgent message from the rural extended family to the suburban children of a diasporic farm girl.  Family should not be taken for granted.  Place and position mean nothing.  Family exists in its extensions.  “This is my body.”  “It is good. It is sweet.  Take and eat.”  My sister, Jennifer, rightly noted that the people in the photo arrange themselves in a Last Supper kind of pose.  But I prefer to see the ritual carving of a watermelon world as Mom’s wish for us to share and enjoy and come together.  If we grab and hoard, then the spirit of Nesco, will be truly lost as this photo almost was.  There is something for everyone in Mom’s house—a house that represents her mind and spirit if not her body exactly.  “Do this in remembrance of me.”