You may not be able to go home again, but your stuff can follow you

A life in nine boxes and six pieces of furniture.

The chandelier in its original setting, circa 1965

After nearly two years of sorting my mother's estate, that's all that was left.  Collected from a storage unit in Kirkwood, shipped slowly trans-Atlantic, held up for three weeks by zealous customs officers in Felixstowe, driven cross country and finally unloaded by a couple of brawny lads in less than half an hour.

Finally, alone with my stuff and a packing knife, I started unwrapping the past, and was confronted with the folly of memory.  For little was as I recalled.

In the cold light of a new house, pieces of furniture that I remembered as beautiful and imposing were underwhelming.  The grandfather clock is a lot smaller than I thought (a grandmother, really), and the wood on that chest of drawers is in horrible shape.  The upholstery on great aunt Lucille's French chairs is badly stained.  I'd never noticed any of this in St. Louis.  Could I have bought better quality stuff at antique shops over here for less than the cost of the shipping?  Quite possibly.

The chandelier moves to my childhood home.

With more silver than we can already use at the average dinner party, all the badly tarnished plate in those boxes left me wondering why I bothered keeping them.  How about my original Macintosh ... the first ever, 512k, 1985.  My dog Windsor's collar and tags ... the only thing on this precariously emotional day that actually sparked tears; I had forgotten I'd kept them.  And that pile of high school yearbooks?  (In my defence, I'm not just IN the yearbooks ... I edited them.)  All these items are here more because I couldn't bear to throw them away than because I wanted to keep them.

But there are a few treasures that justified the shipment.  The bronze Buddha family legend says came from one of my grandfather's patients who'd "liberated" it during the Boxer Rebellion.  (Must get that to the Antiques Roadshow someday.)  Also on the bronze front, the original sculpture of my mother's last golden retriever, heads captured at six, nine and 12 months.  The oil painting of the autumnal riverbank in its outrageously Baroque gold frame.  And best value for money: the chandelier.

The chandelier in place in the Bencard dining room.

Doing a cold calculation, I figure the exercise paid for itself on this one item, as buying anything equivalent would have cost more than the cost of the whole shipment.  The elegant, classic, six-armed crystal piece has hung in my grandparent's house in Bellerive Acres, then my family home in Chesterfield, and now England.  So many Christmas dinners under it, and more to come.  A financial deal, but more than that, memory, tradition and continuity.

Because those are really why we save things.  These weren't boxes of stuff, they were boxes of memory.  A collection of things that tie me to the past, and that childhood home to which I can never return.