As I picked at an ancient crumb stuck down the crack between planks of the table we had recently acquired, I realized why I had been so unsure about bringing home this family heirloom. My father built the long knotty-pine table fifty years ago, from a tree cut on family land in Whately, in the western part of the state. The table, affording panoramic views out over Cape Pogue Pond, had been the center of our Chappaquiddick summer home since my family built the house in 1959. It was the place everyone sat to visit as well as to eat. All those meals with family and cousins, the tea times with my mother and aunts – the happy times as well as the hard ones – were recorded in its knots, dings, and imperfections, and in the crumbs stuck down the crack. Having the table at my house reminds me of the changes in my life, and when I feel like a little kid, it makes me remember I’m an orphan now.
After our father died in 2001, my family sold the property to the Martha’s Vineyard Land Bank Commission with the provision that our mother could use the house until she died. Although my siblings and I would lose the Homestead (as we called it), we wouldn’t lose our sense of home on the island, as five of the six of us have built houses on Chappy, and two of us live here year-round, along with several of the next generation.
In January of 2009, shortly after my mother died, we needed to empty the house. We hadn’t made a plan for this ahead of time – being busy with living – but between phone calls and e-mails, we decided on one. Family members would make lists of the things they especially wanted, lists that would include the wicker furniture (acquired long ago from a family friend’s house) that had always been in our living room; the carved-elephant bookends; The Amazing Adventures of Kermit the Hermit Crab from 1930 – with my mother’s childish signature on the title page; a refrigerator to replace an aging appliance at one of our own houses; and dishes to stock kitchens under construction or still in the dream stage. A few things on the lists would overlap but, being well-brought-up children, we would work out compromises.
After the lists, we made piles of like items: beach chairs and hibachis (it seemed as if every renter had left one), boxes of Kleenex (for some reason my mother stockpiled these, along with sponges), my mother’s handmade pottery, etcetera, so family could look through things before it all went to the thrift store or, for the really derelict items, to the dump. Each time someone besides myself planned to work on the house, I felt nervous that precious items would be tossed out, things that no one valued but me. When my sister made a pile with a sign saying, “For the dump. No Kidding!!” I picked through it anyway – but it really was trash. I think each of us was afraid we’d throw out somebody’s treasure and hear about it later: “What happened to that gun rack I made in junior high?”
I didn’t realize how hard it would be to dispose of all the little, seemingly worthless objects that none of us wanted to take home: for example, the aged scraps of paper stuck under magnets on the fridge door. One was a note, written by my mother for guests and renters, explaining that the carpenter bees by the back door were harmless and shouldn’t be disturbed; another was detailed instruction on how to close the kitchen window that swelled when it rained. These relics held my mother’s essence. They were the comforting remnants of an everyday life that seemed as if it would continue on forever.
Inexorably, the house continued to empty. I’ve always had a secret fear of becoming a bag lady in my old age, but my daughter has no such fears. In fact she seems happy to be one at age twenty-seven. I couldn’t believe it when she filled the old, wire grocery cart – the kind in which homeless people keep all their possessions – with worn dish towels, tattered books, and threadbare blankets for which my mother had replaced the satin bindings, and wheeled it back home. She couldn’t bear to see family artifacts thrown out, so she took the guest book from the hall table, her grandmother’s ancient sewing basket, an account book kept by her great-great-grandfather, and a box of negatives of her sixty-five-year-old uncle as a baby – the first child, and only one to have his early life so extensively documented.
After a week, most things had been removed, but still no one had offered to take the table. My husband, who hadn’t asked for anything yet, said he wanted it. The table had so much family history I couldn’t imagine strangers sitting around it, so I said it could go on our back porch. I wasn’t sure I wanted it to replace our dining table – I wasn’t sure I wanted it at all.
When we got the table home, it wouldn’t fit through the porch door, so our old one ended up on the porch instead. I thought the new table was too long for the space inside, but although it didn’t take me more than a week to get used to the size, I still feel unsure about its place here in the middle of my house. I accept it – the way I’ve come to accept the reasons for it being here – but I don’t love it openheartedly. However, if any of my siblings suddenly had the perfect spot for it at one of their houses, I doubt I’d be willing to part with it.
