A house’s rooms, its family heirlooms have stories to tell

Opinion

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 26/07/2022 (1168 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

I own my home, a 2 1/2-storey, 100-year-old house painted in colours inspired by a folk art cake plate I found in a second-hand store window. My house shows up in sage and burgundy, paprika and curry, a splash or two of cerulean.

I am lucky enough to be a homeowner. I am lucky enough to be able to navigate its levels, having only once fallen down the third-floor stairs (stairs decommissioned since then, now open only to younger, more nimble guests).

This is a house I have long loved, living within its walls through the raising of my children during their teens, full-time employment, and the life of my husband’s illness, which ended in his death five years ago. The house reverberates with the stories that houses-into-homes may embrace and embody.

As someone in her seventh decade and five years widowed, the prospect of downsizing, however, comes more steadily into view.

Do I sell? Find an apartment, a condo in senior’s complex, perhaps even a smaller house requiring less upkeeping energy? So many in a Third Act do just that, releasing themselves from the day-to-day demands of home maintenance and enjoying the freedom to come and go as they wish.

I look into other forms of home-making, visit apartments, talk with friends about condo living. But, this house, warmed by my life — surrounded by a perennial garden whose spirit charms — sticks to me as my story.

So I stay. I survey the demands of the house, its purpose, consider heirlooms whose meaning increases as I have come closer to — and then past — the age when first they were given into my safekeeping.

Tea cups, some of which have found their way from Russia as forebears escaped pogroms at the beginning of the 20th century; crystal my mother purchased with funds she had inherited from her father, thinking crystal might soothe the edges of a frayed marriage; hammered silver Shabbat candlesticks my grandmother cherished; a tea set gifted at my mother’s wedding, polished before any special occasion — my mother, polishing and sighing, for how much work is there with four children born close together and not enough income. How many times might she have wondered if the “family silver” could be sold?

I wonder: What would I still wish to caretake? Does one Passover Seder, hosted in rotation every two years, with all its fuss and pleasure, recommend keeping such objects? Would my children want a dining room table ringing with times past? Perhaps knickknacks bursting with family legend?

I consider Mrs. Portnoy’s hand-painted vase, travelling from Minsk or Pinsk, along with her ambition to recover an errant husband who had left for the new world — he’d promised to send for her once settled, but seemingly abandoned a bargain that only her unexpected arrival reinstated.

I remember the bargains of my past meant to accommodate change: the giveaways as rooms were rearranged and repurposed — couches, chairs, tables, lamps sent off to organizations, to growing-up sons settling their first apartments, to a friend in need of an end table or a handmade scatter rug.

I bargain with my future, and decide crystal, silver, tchochkes, such as they are, must shine in use elsewhere — contribute, if welcomed, to the developing character of my children’s lives.

I think also of the rooms in this house I no longer need. How much space does a seventh-decade woman, retired though involved in creative projects, require?

Even in asking the question, I am aware of my privilege in being able to raise it, just as, in surveying my storied possessions, I understand many have been forced to leave such treasures behind, have had them destroyed, or have never received them as tangible legacy.

I follow a lead. A colleague and I are leading a project dedicated to using myth, archetype and story to nurture creativity and build community. Our workshops and courses live online during lockdowns, but we have considered how this house might be the site of in-person storytelling when circumstances allow.

It becomes clear: redesign first-floor spaces as storytelling breakout rooms. Move furniture, open up possibilities of new, of change. My study goes upstairs, while my grandchildren’s playroom is reconstructed in the basement. The back porch houses packing boxes that will facilitate the trades about to take place as my children consider what they might wish to take. I use “trade” because as these objects travel to their new homes, I see how expansiveness thrives in their release, in my opening a shared space for another purpose.

If possible, if applicable, each of us makes such downsizing and resizing decisions about spaces and objects that have been welcomed and cared for in a lifetime. We consider what to release and what to retain as we move toward our endings.

We consider whether our homes might find new life, new purpose, or whether it would be best to relocate, taking with us essentials redolent of our history. We decide on the extra and the indispensable.

I decide, for example, that even as other memorabilia sets sail, a handmade penknife crafted by my father-in-law must remain with me. A survivor of imprisonment in the Gulag and during the Holocaust, he somehow hid and carried it as his hope for survival. Fashioned by courage within worlds almost impossible either to imagine or endure, it teaches me daily of the dearness of life in the midst of loss, of change. I will caretake its story as family matriarch until I depart the galaxy.

Stories held in spaces, travelling in objects, in peoples, collectively and individually, told at dinner tables and during ceremonies, transform. We carry them, convey them as insight and teaching. They not only seek tellers and listeners and grow through the generations, they also change us by enlarging our capacity to comprehend their both simple and complex realities.

My home, in the midst of downsizing and resizing — with chosen heirlooms retained — grows now to make room for storytelling truths and discoveries.