The Art of Holding On

Jul 13
8 min read

/ Nonfiction /

A family of seasonal wreaths has taken over my childhood home. They alternate which ones greet visitors at the front door, hang over the living room fireplace, and perch above the toilet, adorned with doodads and whirlygigs indicative of various holidays and times of year. Meanwhile, the dozens waiting to be called into service lie about the house in various states of repose, like passed-out frat brothers the morning after a party.

These wreaths share the space with accounting textbooks from the 1960s; old computer equipment; dusty, mismatched, soft-sided luggage; boxes of printed confirmation emails from long-ago-delivered online purchases; novelty soaps shaped like birds, fish, and pears; and other collections, stockpiles, and oddities. I often wonder if someday, the stacks of office supplies and cache of cleaning products might team up to stage a coup, but for now, the wreaths remain in charge.

Oh. Yes! My mom lives there, too, and has for the past fifty years. But she either doesn’t see the clutter or isn’t bothered by it. Every couple of weeks when I visit, I remind her she can blink twice if she needs rescuing. But all she does is shake her head and call me a minimalist. She spits out the word as though it is kind of like being a drug lord, only worse.

So, I was shocked one day in June when, completely out of the blue, she asked if I would help her do “some cleanup” around the house.

“I never realized I had so much stuff,” she told me from the other end of the phone. Which was kind of like someone saying they had no idea the sun is hot, but whatever.

“If it’s OK with the wreaths, I’ll come on Sunday,” I said.

I arrived a few days later with high hopes and a brand-new box of 30-gallon trash bags. Mom took one look at my supplies and asked, “What are those for?” That was my first clue that I was in for a long, frustrating day.

She said she wanted to focus on one of the spare rooms at the end of the hall. My brother’s room growing up, it had been transformed over the past two decades, like the rest of the house, into a cross between Doc Brown’s lab in Back to the Future and Weasleys’ Wizard Wheezes on Diagon Alley. Over here, you have your pile of car fresheners that came free with oil changes of yesteryear. There, your stash of hand-high plastic sunflowers that “dance” when placed on a sunny windowsill. And in that corner? A collection of vintage road atlases and roughly fifty paper maps from the 1990s—and no, they are not trash, even though they’re conveniently being stored in a giant trash bag on the floor.

Before I even tried to set foot in the room, Mom’s tone got stern. “Now, those two boxes on the bed are my mementos,” she said. “We are not getting rid of my mementos.”

“Okay,” I said. (I may be drug lord–adjacent, but I still have a heart.) “And the other stuff?” It’s not like I didn’t have anything left to work with.

“Those are other things I’m not ready to get rid of,” she replied.

After a few confused moments, I came to understand that what my mom wanted was not to do any decluttering but rather to take inventory and relocate a few things. The plan was for me to carefully make my way into the room while my mom called out instructions from the doorway à la Ving Rhames in Mission: Impossible: “What’s in that plastic bag by the bookshelf? No, not the white one! The yellow one!” “Can you reach the DOS manuals under the desk? Great! Now, slide them under the bed.” “If you put one foot on the bed and another on the chair, you should be able to grab the box on top of the tallest pile and tell me what’s in it.”

This system allowed us to confirm that she did in fact have, for example, over forty Phillips head screwdrivers packed neatly in a small plastic bin; a drugstore’s worth of wrapping paper propped up in one corner; and a plastic grocery bag filled with twenty-two calculators, six of which still worked. (Mom asked that I move the calculators into the dining room with the rest of the office supplies, “where they belong.”)

After that, I began retrieving loose items from the floor, holding them up for her to see, and asking with raised eyebrows if the object in my hand was expendable. But each time I did, she declared, “Oh, I love that!” as though she were in a store and seeing it for the first time. I got a similar response each time I pulled something out of the closet, from the bookshelf, or off the twin bed.

An (extremely) abbreviated list of things my mother loves:

A yellow pom-pom made out of yarn and fashioned to look like a baby chick, with googly eyes and an orange felt beak.
A glass aquarium bead with a Sharpie-drawn smiley face on it.
Candles shaped like pieces of candy corn (a small set of three and a medium-sized set of three).
A plastic takeout bag from Cheesecake Factory. (“It has great handles!” she insisted.)
A pencil with an eraser shaped like a chicken.
A kitchen timer shaped like a tomato.
A kitchen timer shaped like an egg.
A kitchen timer shaped like a bust of Beethoven.
A stress ball shaped like an acorn.
A stress ball shaped like an apple.
A stress ball shaped like The Hulk.
A Hot Wheels–sized plastic rendering of the Oscar Mayer Wienermobile.

We spent hours this way—me holding up junk and my mom declaring that she loved it too much to part with it—before I finally said, “You sure do love an awful lot of things.” I did not attempt to hide my exasperation.

I expected her to smirk and snap at me, as she usually did when the topic of decluttering came up. Instead, she turned her head away and, with her eyes on the floor, confessed quietly, “It’s a burden.”

It was a rare display of emotion from Mom, and I wasn’t sure what to do with it. Even if I had had it in me to throw an arm over her shoulders and say something like, “It’s OK; it’s what makes you you,” it would have taken me several minutes to navigate my way through all the clutter over to where she stood in the doorway, and by then the moment would have been lost. So, I busied myself with pawing through more piles.

After I pulled a fourth wicker picnic basket out of the closet and was told it was a keeper like the rest of them, however, I was about ready to call it a day. I was sliding the closet door closed when something wedged against the back wall caught my eye: a piece of posterboard with a picture drawn on it with Magic Markers. I recognized it immediately as something I had made in third grade.

In honor of fire safety week, I had drawn a girl wearing blonde pigtails and a red dress with a short bubble skirt. A book of matches had fallen out of her right hand, and her left hand had flown to her wide-open mouth in shock as a fire raged next to her, obscuring part of a multicolored, oval rope rug. The drawing, now dotted with faint yellow-orange mildew stains, had earned me grand prize in the grade-wide contest, which came with a copy of Shel Silverstein’s The Giving Tree and the chance to have my picture in the local paper. I had been so proud!

“Well, I know you’re not getting rid of this,” I said as I pulled the drawing out of the closet, grabbed the sides, and held it in front of my torso, reenacting the pose I had struck when the newspaper came to school to take my picture.

Mom looked at it for a moment, cocked her head to the side, and said, “I’d be willing to let that go.”

My mouth fell open, closely resembling the girl’s in the drawing.

“Excuse me?” I said. Was I understanding correctly that she wasn’t willing to part with any of her three unopened “Learn How to Speak French” cassette tape kits but had no love for her daughter’s masterpiece? That she couldn’t see fit to get rid of the box of wooden rulers that rivaled her Phillips head screwdriver collection but considered this piece of family history trash?

“This is an award-winning piece of art!” I pointed out incredulously. “This was created when I was at my artistic peak!” Which wasn’t saying much. If I was being honest, the girl was barely more than a stick figure—although for some reason I had given her kneecaps the size of bowling balls.

“Well, I’ve got a lot of art already,” Mom replied, unmoved. (She wasn’t lying.)

At the end of the day, my drawing was the only thing she was willing to get rid of.

But when I stood in Mom’s driveway and dangled the drawing above the opening of the recycling bin, I couldn’t let it go. I knew it made no sense to keep it, but I also knew it was irreplaceable. I couldn’t exactly head over to the drugstore and get another one. So, I slid it onto the back seat of my car, got in the driver’s seat, and pulled out of the driveway.

As I drove home, my emotions changed faster than the wreaths on Mom’s front door. I was disappointed that we hadn’t made more progress on the decluttering front. I was angry that we had to spend a beautiful summer day that way in the first place. I was sad that my childhood home had been swallowed by things.

But I felt something else, too. Was it … compassion? Yes, there was a bit of that. It was the way my mom had sounded ashamed when she said it was a burden to love so many things, her voice quiet, her eyes on the floor. It was easy to be frustrated with her when she didn’t seem to care about the clutter, but much harder when she did.

Then another emotion elbowed its way in: envy. The hoarding issue notwithstanding, it actually sounded kind of magical to go through life that way, with a limitless capacity for finding joy in the unexceptional. A smile snuck onto my face as I remembered how it felt to be nine years old, when a bluejay feather in the backyard qualified as a treasure and the cheap plastic prize from a cereal box might as well have been a winning lottery ticket.

But that smile faded as I considered how much harder it is to come by that kind of euphoria as an adult. The accomplishments, the strokes of luck, the pleasant surprises all need to be so much bigger these days to light up my heart and my brain. I wondered how many opportunities I had missed to be dazzled and elated over the years, and the sense of loss that followed caused my throat to close up momentarily.

It was late when I got home, and all I wanted to do was go to bed. I set my drawing on one of the dining room chairs, propped up against the seat back, with the intention of giving it one more look in the daylight before throwing it out in the morning.

But when morning came and I saw my knobby-kneed accidental arsonist sitting at the table, I still didn’t have the heart to get rid of her. Maybe it was the expression of shock and horror already on her face that made me unable to abandon her. Or maybe it was the fact I had just rediscovered her and didn’t want to let go just yet.

All I know is I tucked the posterboard against the back wall of my closet, a tiny treasure for my Future Self to find. I hope when she does, her first thought is “I love that.”