I found a book in the little free library next to the post office. The dust jacket had a painting of a potted lemon tree and something about creating a garden paradise in Lucca. Italy, gardens, lemons, paradise. This book looked like a keeper to me. And then there was the inscription on the first blank page. It began:
Mother’s Day 2000
Maggie,
I love you…
If someone had written something like that to me in a book, I know I would hold onto it forever. Why hadn’t Maggie? Had she divorced the husband who wrote those words? Had she died and her volumes been dispersed to friends and neighbours and second-hand shops? Or maybe her husband had died and it was just too sad for her to see his handwriting. Or maybe she just wasn’t the sentimental type who keeps every sweet and heartfelt note and card from everyone she’s ever loved. Maybe she’d done some pruning and thinning and thought someone else might enjoy the book as much as she did. And so she was willing to part with it, like a lovely bouquet of flowers, inscription and all—so it could end up in the hands of someone like me.
At any rate, I would wager that Maggie’s office never looked like mine. Mine is burgeoning with:
Crowded shelves of books I may never open again.
Crowded shelves of books I will never open.
23 years worth of laminated newsletters.
Tumbling stacks of half-finished drawings.
Numerous unfinished paintings.
Unfiled receipts.
Tax returns.
Unruly piles of
Thank You
and
Christmas
and
Birthday cards.
30 some odd years of photographs that still haven’t made it into an album.
A box of old love letters.
Returned love letters.
<Ouch!>
College term papers.
(This essay skirts toward a sophistication that it does not quite achieve.)
<Ouch!>
Why do we keep the things we do?
What does what we cling to say about who we are?
My office says that I am a bit of a procrastinator. That I am somewhat afraid of Big Brother. That I would rather be outside than inside. That I am more sentimental than practical. That I do not like to part with things that hold memories or have seemed important to someone else that has been important to me.
What is worth keeping?
And what would we be better to just slough off?
The mementoes we gather throughout our lives are merely metaphors for the stuff that is of true value. If there is sometimes too much room in the garden of the human heart for regret and anger and resentment, there is just enough for the real things that don’t take up any space or collect dust or crumble or tear or ever need trimming at all: joy, hope, meaning, commitment, passion and promise.
Even so, I think my unweeded shelves can support one more slim, hand-me-down tendril of a book, given to Maggie one Mother’s Day not so very long ago, with love.