Cobwebs and Hope

The day after Thanksgiving, I shoveled my way into the old horse-barn to plug up some of the more gaping holes before winter set in. It is November, so despite the snowbanks and bitter cold, our Vermont minds cannot verbalize that winter has already set in, because that would spark a particular kind of depression and despair that we can’t afford to begin before December, when it is O.K. to embrace winter.

As I walked through the hoarder’s paradise ( depending on how you define paradise) my whole life and the imagined lives of a hundred and fifty years of former occupants flashed before me.

Let me explain:
I was looking for just the right piece of wood to nail in front of a small broken (or long disintegrated) window. It always takes a while to find the right piece since I was not about to go looking for a saw. As I spied various planks and stepped over buckets and tarps and tires and tools and pieces of iron to examine them, the realization came to me that each piece of wood had its own part in my childhood. I recognized almost every one, clearly or otherwise. At least two were leaves from tables and there were a couple of parts of dresser drawers. Handling each of them brought a fuzzy memory of to which table  or dresser it belonged and where it had once stood in my house. In some cases I had to stand there for a moment to recollect the details. A drawer handle sparked a childhood memory of riffling through my mother’s dresser when she wasn’t home.

As I continued to the potting shed, I stepped over old biscuit tins and discovered a black garbage bag that appeared to be full of them. I remembered cups of tea and tins of Danish cookies brought by various relatives from or via Montreal. I looked up to see horse harnesses used by ghosts of the past. There were milk cans that some faceless young boy had helped his father load onto wagons in another century. I shouldn’t have said faceless, as we have an old picture of that very boy with a horse and hay rake in front of our house. Upstairs I had seen a butter churn over which a girl had surely slaved. It stood next to an ancient sea chest handed down by some Captain relative and brought over the ocean by my dad in 1962. Perhaps the ghosts of a cabin boy and a farm girl are hugging in the hay loft after the sun goes down. Minus the hay.

I stepped through doors and up ladders and through cobwebs and  over old record players and canning jars and skill saws and lawn mowers - all covered with a sheen of oil and chicken dust and splattered bird poop. My eyes set upon a square piece of something resembling wood with separating layers, and with some effort I recognized it as one of the blue chairs that had stood around several kitchen tables over the years. Those were the chairs that would collapse every once in a while if we were not diligent in keeping the legs screwed in. I saw the wooden pet carrier which we had used to trap raccoons. My old potty chair, complete with a plastic seat-strap  instantly brought my mother’s shrill British voice back to me, telling people “Gillian was potty trained at a year, you know...”. Something in the story about my grandmother being involved makes me want to move on to some other memory. I was standing in the potting shed where my mother and I used to sneak cigarettes. We would talk for hours if it wasn’t winter, in which case we would huddle for a few minutes. It is sad how long talks and cigarettes and lung cancer all get mashed together in the mind.

I happened on some oven racks in the corner. I took a quick inventory of all the stoves we had owned over the years. How many stoves does a family own in a life-time? If they are all previously owned, which they were, that would be about four, maybe five. I remember another November and how when I had a friend over, my mother would dream up pleasant little jobs for us, like scrubbing those oven racks. She handed us a pan of soapy water and Brillo pads and pointed to a place across the road where we were expected to squat down and scrub for the next hour. She acted like it would be the most pleasant activity in the world, since we had a friend to help us. I’m convinced now that she asked because my friend Jessie was too polite to say no. We dutifully took the racks and, with frozen fingers, pretended that we were waif servants and that my mother was the mean owner-lady of the estate where we had so unfortunately been placed after the tragic death of our parents. I hate to say it, but there were times when my mother played the part well. But not on the days when she was pouring us hot cups of tea and feeding us butter tarts and telling us stories of her own childhood in North Wales. Later that long ago afternoon, after scrubbing the oven racks,   we lit the wood stove in the dingy shed that over the the next year would become our kitchen, and pretended that these were the maid’s quarters. It was perfect, as it had a loft upstairs where we would pretend to sleep. That day, besides the time we got stuck on top of the barn roof and subsequently got in trouble, and some of the times we almost killed our little brother and ourselves with improvised see saws and flying machines, or rattling down the hill in flexible flyer sleds and wagons, was one of my best memories. I suppose a trip to Disney would have topped it, had one existed.

...Back to my task at hand. I finally found a piece of particle board that was the perfect size to nail in the window, but by then I had put the hammer down somewhere in the rubble. It took me ten minutes to find it atop an old lawn tractor which had been in use until last summer. In the end I was able to jam an old piece from a broken stall up against the wood to hold it in on a windy day and didn’t need the hammer. I finished the job and went inside to see about filling the wood box.  On my way, I recollected that my daughter had said as a teenager: "this place is held together by cobwebs and hope."

All those pieces of junk reminded me that my childhood was rich, if not somewhat isolated. Those dusty relics reminded me that we grew up with, first of all, Love. With just enough struggle to make us resilient, toil and drudgery to give us a good work ethic, freedom and adventure to make us enjoy life, poverty to make us appreciative and creative, chaos to teach us how to ride a storm, weirdness to give us character or make us characters, and laughter to last a lifetime.