These bookshelves have been around, been in my son’s room for a while. But it was only today that we stacked them in this way. Before this, they’d been side by side, but today was the day to do the post-Rocky rearranging, so here they are.
And just like that – a la Carrie Bradshaw – I remembered my parents’ pantry closet.
For that’s where these shelves lived for years – in the pantry closet in the Knoxville house. They were on the right, and they held my mother’s cookbooks, and they were stacked just like that.
There were a lot of them, those cookbooks. I only kept a few, and almost all of those I’ve now passed on to my daughter. My mother’s recipe file book fell apart and I kept the back cover, and now it’s Art.
I lived in that house for a few years, and I came back to it for more as an adult. I’d walk in the door by the kitchen, and there was the pantry right in front. Brooms, mops, plastic bags – and these shelves and those cookbooks.
They moved into the house in 1973. I’m 61 today. You do the math. Please. You do it.
Here’s the thing. You might expect what follows to be all about what was beautiful and loving and how grieved I am that it’s gone.
But, no.
It was hard, and my parents were miserable individually and together, and therefore I was damaged and often miserable, too.
Those yellow shelves?
I don’t know what they mean.
Except miseries that I would not carry and knew that I had a responsibility to not inflict on others.
But here are those shelves, yes? I did carry them. Of all the stuff in my parents’ home that I could have taken or could have left behind, I did, indeed, keep those yellow shelves.
We are who we are, and we can’t deny it. These are our fathers, these are our mothers, this is us.
But we’re not fated. We have a choice – what will we do with what we are?
What will we carry?
What will we do with those bookshelves?
Where will we put them?
What will we use them for?
How, exactly, will they fit into our lives?
What will go?
What will stay?
And what will we pass on?
Charlotte was Both 