Intangibles

The heartbreaking task of emptying our parents’ house lay before us. The family had lived in it for over 50 years, and it still echoed with 3 generations of children running up and down the hallways, making the noise that kids do, most times joyful, sometimes tearful, never silent. No one wanted this job of cataloguing, sorting, packing up and tossing out. No one wanted to face the possible fights or tears over useless objects that were only valuable because they had been a part of their surroundings for so long. The expensive or valuable items didn’t cause many fights in our family. The siblings tended to watch out for each other to make sure that there was an equitable distribution. No, the fights came from the intangible worth of things unseen. The feelings that arise when one enters each room for the last time are impossible to tally.

How do you mark down how it felt when you played in the large closet in the attic? It was where the costume clothing was kept, and it had always resonated with faint whiffs of mothballs, cedar and aged clothing. If you closed your eyes, you could see yourself playing dress-up in the pink tutu or in the sequined evening gown. The boys, and then men, would don the dinner jackets with tails and look quite dapper. Can you add to the list the smell of our father’s custom blended pipe tobacco that wafted up when we moved his suits in the closet? No one wanted the pipe with the chewed mouthpiece, but we all wanted that smell with the faint hint of cherry. Smells can’t be bottled up and passed on to your heirs. Objects, per se, weren’t the cause of trouble. The enormous, dented aluminum pitcher found in the trash caused a huge upset. It wasn’t the object; it was the memory. The pride of being selected by our mother as the one who could make the iced tea was more important than anything. Could we add that to the list? Seven children had different memories to hold onto and their lists were distinct. To an outsider, these memories, smells and feelings weren’t relevant to the clean out of the home, but these intangibles were everything to us.

We gathered at the house to empty it but first we had to make lists. What to keep, what to throw away. What had value, what didn’t. None of us were willing to sell anything and few of us were willing to claim anything either. More lists were made. The contents of a room, a closet, or a dresser were written down and then disposed of.  The most important list was never put on paper that day because you can’t tally up the intangible. The inventory of memories from our childhood home wasn’t written down but rather, it was engraved in our hearts.