Living in the Center of the Universe - Part Three

Every Picture Has Its Shadows 

Saying goodbye to each picture as I pick it up, I dust where it was then put it on a shelf in the garage.  That artist is pretty well known in Washington.  These I purchased at the Annual Art Festival, a new piece each year.  Who will look at this little statue I got in Arizona when it sits on their own shelf? This little fossil came from an estate sale of a man I never met.  I bought his small collection because I didn’t like the idea that his family could get rid of his things without a sense of his love for those belongings.  Maybe he had bought them when he and his wife traveled the world; perhaps he purchased them on a business trip to bring home to the kids.  No matter.  I have them now and every time I see them I think of the man whose home I walked through all those years ago.  I have no idea who he was but I think of him fondly. 

What about the empty turtle shell, what should I do with it?    I found it in a park in Land O’Lakes, Florida.  1988.  A secret weekend in Longboat Key, romantic with the wind blowing across the Gulf on a cool February evening.  He saw colors in my eyes that he said reflected the sunset.  I never had anyone look into my eyes like that, before or since.  I can still feel the pull.  We took our time driving backroads to the east coast through parts of Florida made famous by old fashioned postcards of Spanish moss covered oak trees. 

Somehow we found ourselves walking on a broad expanse of lawn incredibly green under the cloudless sky when at the same time our eyes fell on two small turtle shells side by side on the grass and completely empty as though their occupants decided to vacate them and move on to another life leaving all vestiges of their old lives behind. We looked at them as a romantic sign and each took a shell to remind ourselves of the weekend and each other. Sell it?  Take it?  I’ll leave it on the shelf and see if someone makes the decision for me.

I found a first edition of Marjorie Kinnan Rawling’s Cross Creek at another estate sale.  This time I did know the person.  She was a young woman, a poet, and I had often heard her name, Noelle, as one of those whispered wistful wishes of my older brothers when I was little.  It wasn’t until after she had died of cancer and I was looking through her bookshelves that I realized whose home I was in and that I had even met her on the beach a few summers before.  Not as the sweet Noelle of my brother’s longings but as Noelle, a really nice lady I met on the beach.  As I stood in the room and read her poetry it washed over me how I missed out on being a friend to this very lovely and special woman.  I longed to reel in the few years I knew her casually and create more of a bond but I was too late.  I didn’t even know she had died.  She got cancer and was gone.  I grieved for her loss and cried in her bedroom.  I think she would have been surprised to have found me there with tears in my eyes.  The estate people sure were.  I could not bear the idea of strangers walking through her home without an idea of who she was so I placed her personalized bookplates in anything I could so that her name at least lived on.

I added to Cross Creek another book, Rawlings’ own published cookbook.  I had heard rumors they existed  and so I looked one for one whenever I was in the bookstore of an old Florida town.   Finally, tucked away in the San Marco Bookstore I found my prize.  I was bound and determined to cook that whitefish stew in my heavy iron dutch oven.  A layer of onions, a layer of potatoes, a layer of fish, salt and peppered, layered tomatoes, onions, potatoes, fish again and tomatoes.  Water to cover, seal and bake.  Cornbread and swamp cabbage slaw.  Beer and friends.   

Why did I feel the need to wash things before I sold them?  Was it to make more money or just the idea that if strangers pawed through my things I wanted those things to be clean?  Both I suppose.  As I put a load of handmade aprons in to the laundry I tied the strings so that they wouldn’t tangle.  With every apron I pictured the life I had pictured, one filled with dinner parties, company around and good food on the table.  The perfect martini glasses were still up on their shelf in the kitchen, part of the same vision.  I had had the glasses since the trip to Coconut Grove with my sister and Mother for a cousin’s wedding. I was in my mid-twenties.  The glasses were Swedish and made of glass so thin that my lips barely felt them when I lifted them to drink.   

The life I had actually lived in was always so casual the glasses and aprons were on the shelf for most of their time with me.  As I stood over the washer I could feel a welling loss rise up inside me when I realized I need not regret their going but thank them for giving me the latest incarnation of a new and exciting life before me.  I had used them for a time and now it was time to let them go on to another world.  In essence, selling these things enabled me to move into a new life with new dreams and visions before me.