Selling Off the Silver

A Move Not Quite Like Any Other

It’s no accident one of my first books was called Good Housekeeping. Setting up and taking down households is something my husband, Pierce, and I have done together for over 40 years. Just over ten years ago we renovated and settled into a “forever apartment” in Forest Hills. No stairs, no sunken living room, shallow tub, we thought we could grow really old here.

Now, we’re off to new adventures in Ireland, and this time, emotions run higher. Since we moved to Rome 40 years ago, we have accumulated furnitures, mementos, documents (wills!), and we have inherited several items from those who are no longer with us, except in the china we use, a table by the bed, a whiskey decanter, or, yes, a set of silver. We have not used it in early twenty years and it was a replacement set in the first place. Gone.

Some of it will get an overdue “good riddance.” Some of it is a little painful, even for someone like myself who long ago took to viewing our homes as stage sets, up and lit as long as the show lasts. My old UN briefcase bought on Piazza di Spagna was one of the most beautiful things I ever owned, before broken straps and worn out leather made it an eyesore. Gone.

The secretary I always wanted. Going…going…See www.Aptdeco.com.

I remember my Aunt Ruth, who is a significant character in my collection, The Elk in the Glade: The World of Pioneer and Painter Jennie Hicks. She was a ranch wife with a cellar filled with dozens of jars of canned goods in a two-story house on a working operation: blacksmith shop, tractors, hundreds of head of cattle, an office full of papers. When she passed, her remaining possessions filled one garbage bag bound for Goodwill. She had sold or placed everything—some of it with me!—and died light as a feather.

Aunt Ruth is my aspiration.

But unfortunately, we’re not there, yet. Four hundred books, thirty years of diaries, a two-year old couch (no one buys couches, believe me), two dog crates, years of Kodak prints in triplicate of lord knows who or what, where is the joy in all that, the joy I’m supposed to use to filter the takes from the trash?

We nearly kept the silver. Pierce said this is what we’ve worked for. We should use it, instead of the stainless. Then he decided to let it go, but to keep a china set we’ve avoided because you can’t microwave or dishwash it. We have time now to wash it.

And we find new appreciation for the privilege this problem actually entails. We are moving by choice, on our own terms, in our own time. A migration such as this is becoming an endangered operation. Even to have lasted, to have accumulated, nested, for better or worse, we know how fortunate we have been, even if we need to remember it better sometimes.

I can’t help but feel all these possessions came so much more easily than they go. I remember the thriving flea markets of Buenos Aires, fueled by their economic chaos. We could supply a whole aisle. I post items on websites and wait. I talk about this to everyone I know. We are at an age when all our friends are done acquiring, it seems. Yet I know new households are coming together and some of this stuff would be fun for them, just as it was for us, once. How do we connect?

One thing I learned from Ruth was to stop buying things. Not to collect things. Not to invest space or energy in them. I have tried. It could be worse.

So, I wrote a poem. What else can one do in the face of this paradox?

What will happen to all this stuff?

I try to live sensibly and yet here

are Great-grandmother’s china, my baby album,

Mother’s funeral flowers, dried,

a French napkin,

the suit I wore to my wedding,

thirty years of journals, sixty feet of books,

my funeral instructions.

I have done it for loved ones:

the swift and brutal sweep

from closet to black bag to Goodwill,

the commercial shredder,

the shrugging taker:

“Why not? It’s nice, I guess.”

and so the heirloom migrates.

I insist I am more than my memorabilia.

Let the worms eat the books, the moths the clothes.

Break up the furniture. Shatter the crystal

in a harried whatever. Yet after all of you

dears have died with my tale,

these shards and shreds embody

all that’s left of me.

The china we’re keeping. Come to lunch in Ireland and you’ll see more!

Remember, we’re here in New York through December, then January and February in Rome, then Ireland. Follow along as the journey continues!

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