What’s in Your Closet?

My sis­ter gave my mother one of those Hall­mark books designed to hold the family’s his­tory, as recorded by the grand­mother. It was pretty and con­tained a lot of ques­tions that the author was sup­posed to answer about his/her child­hood, includ­ing the music, films, books, etc. that were pop­u­lar then.

My mother didn’t think too much of the idea, appar­ently. When we were clean­ing out my par­ents’ house after she moved into an assisted liv­ing envi­ron­ment, we found it.

You guessed it. Blank. Each and every page was as clean, unwrin­kled and utterly devoid of any nota­tions as on the Mother’s Day when my sis­ter pre­sented the book to her.

I have writ­ten pre­vi­ously about the aus­tere cir­cum­stances of my par­ents’ upbring­ing dur­ing the Great Depres­sion. Although she never said it aloud, I know what my mother was think­ing. “We didn’t have time to worry about movies and music. We had to work. We were try­ing to eke out a liv­ing.” To her, that book was friv­o­lous, super­flu­ous. Unlike her daugh­ter, my mother was not a writer. Oh, she was intel­li­gent, artic­u­late and extremely insight­ful. But her hands never touched a key­board. They were too busy cook­ing, clean­ing, sewing, gar­den­ing and, in her later years, cro­chet­ing. My par­ents told us what they wanted us to know.

And yet …

Imag­ine our shock when we found a scrap­book we had never seen before. A scrap­book full of my mother’s mem­o­ries of an extremely dif­fi­cult time in their lives: World War II. (That photo was taken on Wash­ing­ton Street right here in Lodi in 1943 when my father was sta­tioned at Sharpe Army Depot in Stock­ton and my mother came from South Dakota for a visit.)

It was hid­den away in the top com­part­ment of the closet in my old bed­room, which has been MattieBoo’s room for more than five years now. After I moved out, that room became my mother’s sewing room and office. She had a sofa bed, tele­vi­sion and desk there, along with her faith­ful Singer sewing machine (black with gold trim in a blond cab­i­net pur­chased in the early 1950’s before I was born — she used to tell us about the day the Singer sales­man came to town and my father decided they should trade in her trea­dle machine for an elec­tric model). The book was all the way on the back of the shelf … I had to stand on top of the step stool in order to reach in and pull it out.

When I stood up on my tippy-toes, reach­ing into the dark region of the closet, I instantly knew, as I used my fin­ger­tips to slide it for­ward and get a good grip on it, that I had never before seen the old-fashioned brown “Scrap­book.” The look on my sister’s face told me that she was just as sur­prised. Since she is eight years my senior, she some­times remem­bers sto­ries or peo­ple that I don’t rec­ol­lect, but this was not one of those times.

We sat at my mother’s desk, mes­mer­ized by the items glued to the pages and the nota­tions placed next to them in a youth­ful ver­sion of the hand­writ­ing we knew so well. We exam­ined the ration cards, Blue Star ban­ner that my mother had dis­played in the win­dow, my father’s dog­tags and all the other trea­sures con­tained there.

It’s hard to envi­sion your par­ents as young lovers. But this was a scrap­book com­piled by a young bride in her mid-20’s. After all, my par­ents were mar­ried in March 1941 and just one year later, my father received “greet­ings from the U.S. Gov­ern­ment.” He served in the Army Air Corps in Aus­tralia and New Zealand while my mother waited for him at home with her par­ents on the fam­ily farm in South Dakota.

Ear­lier, we had sur­veyed the con­tents of her cedar chest. As a child, I hap­pened upon bun­dles of let­ters stored there, but my mother promptly snatched them away from me. Some­time between that day and the day we found the scrap­book, my par­ents must have decided that those let­ters should never be read by their chil­dren because they were no longer in the cedar chest — or any­where else in this house — by the time we were left to take inven­tory of all that they amassed dur­ing their lives. Gone for­ever, no doubt burned in the fire­place one win­ter evening to pre­vent the most pri­vate details of their rela­tion­ship from ever being revealed.

I will never know for sure, but I sus­pect my mother might have for­got­ten about the scrap­book. Oth­er­wise, I think she might have removed some of the cards and let­ters my father mailed from a vari­ety of locales. My sis­ter and I couldn’t resist a gig­gle or two as we read the mes­sages. “Kenny wrote this mushy stuff?” I mar­veled, as she rolled her eyes at me. “I just can’t pic­ture it,” I told her.

Would she have removed the telegrams included in the scrap­book? I won­der. But I’m glad she never did because my sis­ter and I learned a great deal about our fam­ily his­tory, as well as my par­ents’ rela­tion­ship, when we saw the series of telegrams he sent as he worked his way back to South Dakota to resume mar­ried life with his young bride.

Over the first, declar­ing that the war was indeed over and he would be com­ing back to her, she wrote, in huge let­ters, “The hap­pi­est day ever.”

I live in a house that is filled with my family’s his­tory, but I won­der from time to time what sig­nif­i­cance that his­tory will have for my chil­dren — or my nephews. Some­times I think about writ­ing a nar­ra­tive about it all, going from room to room, cab­i­net to cab­i­net, closet to closet, to detail the story behind each item and memo­ri­al­ize the events that have tran­spired in these rooms.

When I think about that scrap­book, I won­der what else is hid­den away in the clos­ets, cup­boards, draw­ers … What will my chil­dren find in this house when I am gone and what will they learn about me or other mem­bers of the fam­ily via their dis­cov­ery? What aspects of my per­son­al­ity or our fam­ily his­tory will they learn about not by inter­act­ing with me every day over the years, but from clues con­tained in the arti­facts I leave behind?

What’s in your closet? What do those items reveal about you or your fam­ily history?

Tech­no­rati Tags: Col­lo­quium on Writing

On the Same Topic:

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• In 250 Words or Less …
• Writea­palooza: The Best of 2008
• The Power of a Word
• Scary Christ­mas: Hol­i­day Real­ity Checks