Who Was She?

What’s on my mind?

Her lidless canning jars, turned up, catching the dust. Her Parowax, to top the jams and jellies she once made. Her salad spinner, wok, spice rack. Her collection of embroidered pillows with polyester-stitched kittens, rainbows, beaming children on swings. Her mismatched plates of all sizes, teetering in a pile marked ASK FOR HELP.

Her haphazard collection of tea tins, cookie tins, Christmas tins, cake tins. Nineteen of them; I counted. The vintage ones would have been snapped up when the sale began an hour ago; these are the dregs. Her large and larger roasting pans - so spotless, they appear never to have held a turkey or a roast. 

Perhaps she scrubbed them with a fervor known only under revival tents. Perhaps she and he - their grown children too busy to come - lined up for the 4 o’clock Christmas and Easter specials in one of those cafés so accommodating to lonely seniors.

Her drinking glasses; no three alike. Her vases - the cheap, free kind that arrive with a florist’s knock - so many, and so dusty, he probably died long ago. 

Her tired saucepans; pressure cooker; canner; jelly molds ... All on the wooden shelves he built in the days before DYI plastic shelving. I suspect he would have built them. She probably wasn’t the hammer-and saw type, what with the embroidered pillows and all.

Her cast iron skillets. Her angel cake pan. Her teapot. Her plastic and foil wraps (Will this sale extract the very last dime from her possessions?).

Walking from room to room, I think: “How could she have wanted to stay in this house, with its run-down garden and whiff of mold in the walls? How could she? Why didn’t she just … get cracking and move?”

I looked her up. Not so hard to do. Criss-cross the address to the phone; criss-cross the phone to the name; criss-cross the name to the obit. She died at 94. Why didn’t she just pack up and leave?

Too tired, I suppose. Too old. Too many memories in these musty walls; in that overgrown garden with its high yellow grass. Why didn’t she just cut the lawn?

A faded family photograph - circa late 1800s - of a uniformed soldier looking chuffed for God-only-knows which war; his wife, looking dour; two bedraggled children, looking bewildered. Did his effort make a difference, or was it for naught? Did he die in the war? Did he return to this woman and to these small children? If he did, was he the same man who left?

Who was she? Her name, I already know, but who was she? Was her mother or her grandmother one of the children in the photo? The house is for sale. A knock-down, likely. 

The infinite, immeasurable sadness of the things she once loved! Her adult children - if she had any - would have said: “No thanks, Mum! We don’t want your pressure cooker! You can keep those pillows!”

The sale ad showed a framed portrait of Queen Victoria - somber in widow’s weeds and lace; a fan in her left hand, her right resting on a small table. The picture bears a plaque headed: IN MEMORIAM OF OUR BELOVED QUEEN VICTORIA. It was gone when we arrived. An antique dealer would have snatched it up. 

The infinite, immeasurable sadness … Who was she? 

© Nicole Parton, 2019