Just left of the sliding glass door that leads to the back deck and the yard below, the peace lily blooms. A single white flower stretches towards the ceiling – still curled in on itself before its great unveiling. The plant sits on a small pedestal-like storage trunk/ottoman/end table – knee-high and angled in the corner of the dining room. The edges the lily’s bigger leaves are brown. I don’t prune it often. The smaller leaves underneath droop – heads hanging low, parishioners in prayer waiting for salvation and little more water. The pot isn’t quite a triangle and isn’t quite a circle. It’s smooth and black and oddly comforting. It, the plant and the pot, has made its way from Philly to Yardley to Memphis to State College. I don’t know its history before it came in to my possession other than the brief period when it resided on a cement bench in my girlfriend’s shower where I imagine the humidity allowed it to thrive.
I was working on a few poems this morning when I thought about the plant. I thought about how some of its leaves predate me and that relationship. I started to look around the house at “my” things… pieces of my past and pieces of other people that I have carried with me. Almost everything has a story – photos, art, furniture, clothing, and plants. Boxed up in the basement are “keepsakes” – ticket stubs and event programs, photo albums that no longer see the light of day. Somewhere there’s a gray photo envelope with pictures of my high school sweetheart. Somewhere there’s a box with some nice watches that no longer keep time and a well-worn wedding band. There are also all of the unseen things, the mannerisms and activities that fill my day-to-day… the dinners I make, the wines I drink, the songs I listen to.
For me, it’s hard to distinguish who I am without giving consideration to the broader mosaic – the me vs. the pieces of me / pieces of others. I’m not sure I thought much about this until I started to see myself through the eyes of others. I still get tripped up over the independent self vs. the self as part of something bigger (convinced we can, and must, be both). I still get tripped up over this notion of a self that is borrowed from others and re-assembled time and time again.
I can specifically remember one time when someone I was dating came over to my house for the first time. When we talked the next day, she said she liked my place, but didn’t feel like it was mine – the sofas, the decor, the colors. She said she felt like I was keeping it the way it was from when I was married – like she was in my married house. At the time, I hadn’t given it much thought. I lived with what I had been living with. I didn’t really have a sense of style and with a mortgage on only one salary I tended towards the practical – which, at the time, was the status quo. My wife and I had spent a lot of years with hand-me-downs. We accumulated things, but without much thought or purpose. We bought what we wanted. We bought what we needed. The big purchases (furniture mostly) we made together, but I’m not sure either of us had a vision for our space… I know I didn’t. Anyway, I liked the woman I was dating and wanted her to feel comfortable at my place. I changed things up. I went out and bought new linens and new art – small things that were easy and manageable. A little while later (we might have been broken up by then), I took on some bigger projects. I tore up all of the carpet, re-did two of the rooms, and painted the kitchen cabinets.
The place stayed like that for a while. I met other people, had other relationships, and again settled into a type of status quo. I started spending more time outside of the house than I did inside of it. I tore down the garden so that instead of tending to it, I could spend my weekends day-tripping to the beach or hiking. Every now and then, I would purge things from the house in favor of cleaner, less cluttered spaces – a lot of stuff had been left behind. The cycle seemed to move from the house to the garage and then out of the garage and into the trash or donated.
By the time I moved out of my house and down to Memphis, the place had changed a lot. It was brighter, and greener (plants), and a little more modern, if not minimalist, looking. The big changes came with another relationship. The bathroom got redone during a short breakup. The purge happened when she moved in and I sold most of my furniture to make room for hers and we started buying a few things together. When she left, she took her stuff with her and the place was hollow. The joint purchases stayed: a sofa, a shelving unit, a lamp. She also left a bench of hers that I had liked and the plant now blooming in the corner.
As I look around my house now, it’s a mish-mash of my things and what was already here. It’s not my place, and as such, I again live with the status quo. But everywhere, there’s this odd history. I have plants that all descend from a housewarming gift given to my ex and I a little over twenty years ago (and another one that we rescued from her office). I have plants that I bought when I remodeled the bathroom after that breakup. I have a cool bookshelf that I bought at an auction in Memphis – it will always remind me of my friend Stacy who invited me to the auction when I was new in town and had no friends. I occasionally make cubano sandwiches and pepperoncini beef sandwiches, two things my ex and I used to make. I have photos hanging on the walls from hikes she and I took in the Grand Canyon of PA – one picture is of “the General” a rusted out steam shovel in the middle of the woods near Harrisburg. I have an atomic clock from an in-law. Dishes from when I got married. Books from when I was an editor. I have a flannel shirt the fiancee gave to me and happened to wear the day we got engaged. A work bag, my stereo, a suitcase – all gifts from people no longer in my life. A sofa, a bench, the stoneware cup that holds my toothbrush – all things left behind by others.
At times, it feels overly sentimental to attach such histories to these things around the house. Yet, in my more contemplative moods, it’s what I think of when I see these objects – each with their own origin story. At times, it feels pessimistic (or fatalistic) to spend my time (any time) looking back, but it’s always with a certain fondness. To be honest, I’m wary of people who never look back… it seems like a denial of some part of who they are or were. I’ve seen this a lot in the dating world – declarations of being true to oneself and not letting others define you…. At any given moment in time how else can we define ourselves other than this jumble of past experiences and future aspirations. What other ways do we define ourselves other than by the things we carry and the grace with which we carry them?