Bequested, Bothered and Bewildered

JULIA SPENCER-FLEMING: As some of you may recall, my mother passed away a little over a year ago. I recently made a trip to my Dad's to help carry away stuff he's clearing out (he's fine in his own home, thankfully, but he wants to prepare as best he can for the possibility he'll have to move into some form of assisted living.) While I was happy to take several objets d'arte, some lovely glassware, and FIFTEEN photo albums, it's got me to thinking - my house is starting to fill up with dead people's stuff. Which leads to the question, what do you do with it all?

It started with my grandmother, who left me some fine pieces of furniture. She had four children and eighteen grandchildren when she died, so no one heir got overloaded. Then, Ross's dad downsized by handing over all the family goodies from his parents - silver, china, art, knick-knacks. Tasteful knock-knacks, but you still need to find a place to display them, When my father-in-law departed this life in 2002, the real deluge hit. Despite "mindfully living into simplicity" (Victor was reared in Connecticut but became the ultimate Southern Californian in the second half of his life) we had six enormous suitcases of stuff and shipped the same number of UPS's largest boxes home. There are STILL unopened boxes stored in my barn. 


 I've come to divide these mementos of a loved one's life into a few categories. First is the easiest - inexpensive and useful. Books can go to Goodwill. Toys (for grandchildren long since grown) are welcome at family or women's shelters, as are clothing donations. Kitchen ware, fans, cleaning supplies - there are dozens of charitable endeavors happy to take them off your hands. Second easiest? Expensive and useful. Ross's dad left dozens of exquisite ties by Hermes and Brooks Brothers, from Jermyn Street and Hong Kong. The Sailor has a lifetime supply ready at hand. Silver and good china falls in this category, if you 
 use it, and I do.


Third, and getting trickier: inexpensive and useless. Most sentimental stuff falls in this category, which is why it's so difficult to figure out what to do. Do you save old Playbills from Broadway shows from the seventies? How about the newspaper clippings. the matchbooks and the photographs. Oh, my lord, so many photographs. Costume jewelry you'll never wear, but can picture your grandmother in. Grandma's hand-crocheted afghans. One is useful, but you have ten, and several of them were made up in those uniquely 1970s colorways.

It would be lovely to save it all, but it keeps piling up - our stuff and our parents' stuff and our grandparents' stuff. This may be why in the olden days, people moved into a house and kept it in the family for a century. They were just avoiding making hard decisions.

Equally tricky, in a different way, are those things that are expensive and useless. I now have a set of twelve beautiful Danish modern crystal double shot glasses from the sixties, when adults evidently partied as hard as kids at a twenty-first birthday party do today. Wine glasses, I can use. Highball glasses, even. My friends appreciate a nice drink or two. But there's no way I'm going to be lining up double shots at my next dinner party. Besides, I already have a complete set of hand-painted 1950s shot glasses from the Philippines (another bequest.) 

Then there are the fancy smoking accoutrements, the heavy crystal ashtrays (so useful in old murder mysteries!) the silver cigarette holders, the embossed leather and silver match holders and the pepper mill-sized lighters you kept on the coffee table and used, I guess, if Bette Davis and Joan Crawford came for cocktails. I have all of these, dating back to the thirties and forties and fifties, and the only way they'll ever recoup their value is if a production company decides to make another version of MAD MEN, but starring stockbrokers during the Truman Administration.

 Some things simply go out of style. My dad, in his downsizing, would like to sell mom's china cabinet. It's a high-quality piece, cherry wood, felt-lined drawers, weighs about 500 pounds, and it has a distinctively mid-eighties look that isn't modern, or vintage, or midcentury, or anything, really, other than Not What People Want these days. (Ironically, Mom got rid of the Danish Modern teak cabinet, which would fetch a small fortune now, because it was so completely out of style in the eighties. Sic Transit Gloria Mundi.) All us kids have out own china cabinets by now - I'm hoping my Rustic Pine 1990 hutch will be back in fashion before I shuffle off this mortal coil - so passing it on is a nonstarter. Unless, God forbid, Dad still has it on that day, hopefully many years in the future, when he goes to join Mom. 



I'm close to the end of the period of my life when I'll be inheriting stuff. When Dad goes, it'll be my generation, my brother and sister and I on the leading edge (and thankfully they both have kids so I'll never have to clean out their houses.) I need to start passing heirlooms along to my children and work on winnowing down those difficult, sentimental-but-what-do-you-do-with-them items.

Unless...I do have a large cellar. And a full attic. And a barn. If I can just revive that idea that the house stays in the family for a hundred years, I may never have to sort through those fifteen photo albums.

Dear readers, have you dealt with hand-me-downs, heirlooms and hodge-podge? What's been your approach to taming the generational tide of stuff?