Further to my recent post I’m happy to report that all boxes that we transported from Wellington have been opened. The process was quite straightforward: open a box, decide what we want to keep, find its partner in a cupboard/drawer and replace this with the Wellington version. The idea is sound; the practice…well, let’s just say we seem to have a process fail. Reality found me surrounded by piles of packing paper and piles of crockery/kitchen equipment whilst I decided which of a pair I preferred. I may have mentioned before that this wasn’t the easy part.
We now have fewer boxes, and some have To Go scrawled upon them (quick pat on the back for me). Others have Check, their contents being items I can’t (or am not prepared to) make a decision about on my own and am awaiting Neil’s input. I’m a learning being and I’ve learned over the last couple of weeks that it’s maybe best waiting until I have his full attention to ask him to engage decision-making-capability. Thus we don’t have the situation of him holding up a sieve (or similar) and asking: What’s this doing here? Where’s the one we normally use? If he knew what was in store for him he wouldn’t be looking forward to the weekend so much.
One box is full of glassware. As we already had a fully-stocked home when we married we set up a wedding list at a local glass company. We never use the beautiful decanter or jug and the wine glasses are ‘the wrong shape’ (Neil deciding this when he first took a serious interest in wine). I have no idea why we have brandy glasses as we don’t drink the stuff, and his recent discovery that whiskey should be served in smaller, fluted, glasses rather than the straight-sided whiskey tumblers we have means those are also redundant. Still, neither of us is ready to get rid of any of it, despite that Neil is nowhere near as sentimental about these things as I am.
On the subject of sentimentality, from one box I pulled a hard flat package. In it was a picture, a worthless print of a little girl. She has blonde hair and blue eyes, wears a blue dress and holds a teddy bear, a puppy peeping from behind one leg. It is one of a pair, the other being of a little girl in a red dress with dark hair and eyes and, I think, holding a puppy. At this point I’ll mention that I have (okay, pedants, had) blonde hair and blue eyes and my sister has (had…) dark hair and dark eyes – these pictures were gifts from our grandparents, so long ago I don’t remember when, just that mine has always been there. I don’t know if my sister still has hers.
On the chest in our bedroom are a couple of cheap china ornaments, a girl in a bonnet and shepherdess-style frock holding a basket and looking sideways at a boy in a farmer-hat and dungarees, he looking back at her. The female counterpart (and a matching one to my sister – getting the pattern here?) was a gift from Nannan alone, so I must have been over twelve, the age I was when Grandad died. I found the boy in Sheffield market to make the perfect pair. It may not surprise you to learn that my husband and I have argued before over the merit of keeping these items, whereupon he decreed that I could do so only if they were kept away from public view so no one can think he has such bad taste.
I still have my doll. As I do, she has a sister. They arrived one Christmas from Mum and Dad, wearing dresses made by Nannan in fabric leftover from dresses she’d made for us. Mine sits with two small teddy bears on her lap, one that was my mother’s leaving present when, pregnant with me, she left work; the other was made by Nannan (and it also has a twin). Thrown near her is a heart-shaped pyjama case with a lacey T sewn onto it, orange and made (guess by whom) of leftover fabric from a dressing gown. Do I need to tell you that my sister has one with a K? Until we were adults our grandparental gifts were pairs. In Neil’s defence, when I mentioned that I would get rid of the heart he said: But it means a lot to you. And he knows, should there be a threat to the house from fire, earthquake or flood, that he must risk his life to save Big Ted, who came into my life earlier than I can remember, although there is pictorial evidence of his arrival, sitting beside me on the sofa, larger than I am. He’s no longer the bright golden he was, his nose is ragged and his ear has been re-sewn countless times – when I first had him he was too large for me to carry so I dragged him around by the ear. As am I, he’s a bit saggy around the middle.
Somewhere upstairs in a box hidden at the back of a cupboard are a couple of A4 hardbacked exercise books, the beginning of my journalling. As I was a teenager at the time they don’t make good reading and I cringe at both their content and how badly they are written, to the extent that when I unearth the box next I will consign them to the fire. What will challenge me are the other items I will find. I can’t say for certain what many of them are but I know there is a small bag, white Broderie Anglaise with a red lining and red drawstring closure, that I carried when I was attendant to the May Queen at our local church. I think I was around ten. In it are a few handkerchiefs, a couple that I had as a child, one that was Nannan’s and I chose as a keepsake when she died. You can guess that Marie Kondo doesn’t have a lot of influence on my life.
I’ve digressed somewhat from the original direction of this post, but if you’re a regular reader you’ll know this is not unusual. I have a butterfly mind and keeping to the subject can be challenging for me, a bit like unpacking boxes and making decisions about what to keep or discard. On that note, it’s a task I really need to apply myself to rather than faffing about at a keyboard.
Tracy Annenberg 