Trousseau troubles

My home and garage have become a repository for everybody’s cast-offs. Our entire family seems composed of magpies who cannot part with any item regardless of its lack of intrinsic value. Maybe that’s a little unfair. Everything has SOME value, be it monetary, sentimental, a spare of something hard to find, a “you never know when this may come in useful” item, or something just so pretty that it has to be kept. I’m sure we all have some of these tucked away somewhere. But my garage and cupboards – now they are in a category all of their own.

It is an old Mediterranean custom to provide each young girl with a trousseau (usually linen) for use when she eventually marries. My Italian mother proudly kept the few items of her trousseau she could transport out of WW II Italy, and was determined to do better by her own daughters. My trousseau was generous indeed. Over the years Mom accumulated towels, tablecloths, dish towels, blankets, sheets, pillowcases, pillows, serviettes, dustcloths, face cloths, cutlery sets, an entire range of stainless steel pots and pans, baking trays, brooms, buckets, scrubbing brushes – you name it, she had it! And all this in duplicate – one set for me, one for my younger sister. In honesty, all this came in very handy when I got married, as I was still a student, and my young husband had just started his internship, earning all of R200 pm, of which R90 went just for rent. My trousseau was proudly unpacked into the cupboards, and I got a warm house-wifely feeling seeing the shelves tidily packed with all these treasures.

Over the years, all the items were put to use, but more carefully than any others. It was as if they were somehow more precious. Even the plastic buckets were handled as if made of crystal, and were carefully washed and dried before being stored away after use. It must also be said that Mom always believed in buying the best she could afford, and she sometimes just bought the best anyway, even if she couldn’t really afford it. So, the trousseau items just lasted and lasted. Over the next 29 years, all of this stuff got packed, moved and unpacked to five different homes, the last one being my current home. 

During that same time, though, two lovely daughters made their appearance: yes, that meant two new trousseaux to start and store. I never reached the pots and pans stage, but did get quite a bit stashed away in the linen category. And all this got packed and moved around too. My elder daughter moved to another city when she married, but left her trousseau behind. With the beautiful linens and kitchen equipment available today, I can see that her trousseau things must have seemed dull in the extreme, so I joined her excitement at setting up her own home with her own choice of things. Then my younger daughter went into digs. As this was around the time of our divorce, it was easier to provide her with items for her flat from the “stock” of our home, which was being divided up anyway. So her trousseau also remained untouched.

Guess which parent got custody of the trousseaux?

At that time, my parents were getting on in years, and decided that they needed to downscale to a retirement village. They began rationalizing their possessions, and naturally wanted to pass on to me anything of potential use, rather than give it away to a stranger. I didn’t have the heart to turn down the boxes of surplus towels, table linen, bed linen etc which they decided they would never use. Some of these were still in their original wrapping, gifts from many years back. I dutifully thanked them and removed the boxes, sighing inwardly because I knew that I simply had no place to store them. And the boxes just kept coming. The squeeze was really on for me, as I had downsized of necessity after the divorce, and had my half of household goods, (some of which had formed part of my trousseau), the girls’ trousseaux, and now I had to find place for my parent’s off-casts as well. And just when I had repacked the cupboards to fit everything in, the next box of goods would arrive. I eventually learned to live with boxes jammed into every crevice, tucked under every bed (why DON’T they make beds on legs anymore – all that wasted space!), and some just stood around here and there like standby passengers at an airport hoping for a seat on the next flight. I began to dread birthdays and Christmases, when the family felt obliged to give gifts – where to store them?

I stumbled on in this mode until the unthinkable happened; my gentle, loving father died in his sleep. As he had always taken care of my Mom who was now almost bedridden and  incontinent in her advanced stage of Alzheimers, we had no real choice but to sell their retirement home and move Mom to a frail care facility down the road from me, where I could visit her daily. I couldn’t bear to toss out the few belongings they had taken with them to their retirement village, so these joined their erstwhile housemates in my garage. Mom had a cheerful private room in the frail care, with a huge clothes cupboard, bedside cupboard/dresser, even her own fridge. It was reassuring to her to be able to fish out of storage an item she would suddenly remember and ask for, and then I was pleased that I had not disposed of so many of their things.

As the months passed, it became clear that Mom’s world was shrinking fast. Her needs became less and less, until eventually all her life’s requirements could be accommodated on a few hangers, one shelf and a store of disposable nappies at the bottom of the empty cupboard. Even her wheelchair stood folded away gathering dust. The staff at the frail care had asked me to remove the increasingly superfluous items, rather than risk them being stolen. So this too, was added to the store at my home. My fun-loving, energetic, hardworking mother had been receding into the distance of memories over the years, and, one lonely night, the shell of this person-who-was, quietly slipped away. The day after Mom died, I emptied her room, and was again moved to tears by what her life’s possessions amounted to: two shopping bags of clothes, and another one with toiletries, medications and her portable radio.

Months later, I gathered enough courage to try to sort out her things, and was determined to give everything away – after all, there was nothing I could use. I managed fairly well on the whole, though there were some items I simply could not bring myself to part with. I never liked her black handbag, but she loved it, and used it every single day, even if was just to store her cigarettes or her favourite comb. Yes, there are now a few new boxes, with my memories of her carefully tucked away. 

How does one deal with this? The items themselves are not the problem, but they are a link to the past, a key to a treasure trove of memories which, once entered, explode with a domino effect. All the “remember when”s come tumbling out unbidden, with unstoppable tears and that deep ache that only irreplaceable loss can elicit. I have tried many times to rationalize both the situation and my approach to it, but have yet to succeed. Whenever I start to unpack a box, the memories sidetrack me so effectively that I land up just repacking it, resolving to deal with it another time. I am clearly not yet ready to let go, even though I know I shall have to at some time.

My cupboards and garage are still bulging at the seams with “not-my” stuff, and every day, in some part of my life, I am touched by the legacy of my parents. Perhaps I sharpen my kitchen knife on a real whetstone, something my father kept from his days as a coachbuilder on the old SA Railways. Mom had a pair of scissors with the tiniest points imaginable – they had come with her foot-treadle Pfaff sewing machine as embroidery scissors – and these are in regular use for stubborn stitches which simply cannot be removed with any other instrument. I have an old comfortable jersey I wear around the house ; it is baggy and discoloured but soft and warm, and was the last thing Mom knitted for me. Somehow these links keep my parents very real to me, and are a constant reminder of what they meant to me, and how they helped make me what I am today.

I couldn’t help smile though, when I unpacked one of the boxes Mom specially wanted me to have. Inside, carefully folded, were items of Mom’s own trousseau. Her mother had hand made and hand embroidered, sheets and towels made of linen (no terry-towelling in a little Italian village in the 1920’s). These had been brought to South Africa in 1949 when Mom arriveded here as a war bride, and she had never used them, despite the grinding poverty she and my Dad endured. She kept them in memory of the love her mother had for her, and passed them on to me. She clearly had a trousseau problem too.

I predict that my garage and cupboards won’t have space to let for some time yet.

(c) Anna G. Hall

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