I spent all day yesterday in my attic. Hunching over to avoid the gabled beams, I labored for hours packing away Halloween and Thanksgiving/fall decorations, stacking items collected over a lifetime to the rafters.
I was especially nostalgic this year, taking care to pack carefully in case someone else had to unpack it the next time. Wrapping each ceramic turkey and every platter tenderly, tucking the gravy boats and ladles safely in tissue paper and bubble wrap.
I wasn’t being morbid, just wondering how many more trips I could make up those fold-down attic stairs. Maneuvering those rickety things with an armload of breakable turkeys is no small fete.
This isn’t valuable high-dollar stuff we’re talking here, just a mother’s memories. Little handprints on brightly colored construction paper fashioned to look like turkey feathers and signed in crooked block letters with the names of my children.
There are dozens of Thanksgiving salt and pepper shakers, one for each year. All colors, shapes and sizes, each one a memory.
Saving all these things comes naturally to me. My grandmother saved everything -string, marbles, rusty nuts and bolts and chipped China cups. It may be a Southern thing…I’m not sure. Once I found 14 turkey wishbones in a butter container tucked away in her kitchen cabinet. I asked her why she was keeping them and she replied that she’d read in Heloise’s column that if you polished them and tied a ribbon around the end they made pretty adornments for Christmas presents.
There were old brown glass apothecary bottles, and lots of cobalt blue ones that she kept in the sunny west window of her den. One drawer was filled with every key she’d ever used, the locks long ago changed or forgotten.
Her attic was a depository of castoff items for the entire family. Old hats, boxes of mismatched gloves, out-of-date shoes and whatnot. It was the perfect place for playing dress-up on rainy days.
Hers wasn’t a cramped gable attic like mine. It consisted of a couple of rustic rooms with unfinished floors and walls where my mother and her sisters slept when they were young girls. There were boxes of old love letters and their musty high school yearbooks, romantic letters from faraway places written by boys in the Army and the Navy, letter sweaters and tons of old black and white pictures of girls in long straight skirts and bobby socks, their hair curled tightly at the ends and lips dark with heavily applied lipstick.
One day not long before she died we were all gathered around Granny’s kitchen table talking and eating her mouthwatering fried chicken and made-from-scratch biscuits. She mentioned something about being up in the attic. Everything stopped. Jaws dropped and forks paused in mid-air.
She hadn’t been up those stairs in years. Afraid she would fall and break a hip or worse, my mother and aunts had ordered her to stay off the stairs.
“Mother, the very idea! What do you mean, going up those stairs? You know how dangerous that is!” my mom exclaimed, frightened at the thought of what a fall would have done to Granny, now in her mid-eighties.
Granny calmly replied, “I just wanted to see my things one more time.”
She went on to explain that by sitting down on the last step she’d bounced on her bottom all the way up, using the same process to get back down.
I think about her every time I perch at that opening in my ceiling. I can just see her touching her belongings, remembering where she wore each dress, finding precious knick-knacks long forgotten, leafing through old copies of Progressive Farmer and The Saturday Evening Post, and going through plastic bags filled with fabric scraps she’d saved for quilts.
That’s why I try to pack everything away so neatly, not knowing when my own kids will ban me from going up there. I say good-bye every year to treasures that will probably be sold at a yard sale for a few pennies someday, just in case it’s the last time.
They’ll say the same thing, “Mother, you can’t be climbing those flimsy old stairs! You’ll fall and break something!”
Still, when that time finally comes, just like her, I’ll probably sneak up there to see “my things” just one more time.
