Symbel-wynn Reflections

(Bandersnatcher Picture Prompt #2)

 I close the door on the outside world of dozens of hugs, shared memories, and funeral potatoes. I can feel mental exhaustion setting in, but my rest must wait as I turn to prepare the tiny world within these four walls.

My task is clear. A date is set for the sale, and everything must go, for she has taken nothing with her. 

I am calm and collected. I have prepared my heart for the assignment and placed my grief in its box with hastily scribbled words: Off limits. Do not open. 

At least, not yet.

I walk slowly through each room, my dry eyes lingering over every detail. Within one of the artistically slanted frames that Grandpa crafted and hung so many years ago, a cheeky, blonde girl grins. Suddenly, I am that child again and sight blurs with memory. I am enveloped in the sights and smells I know well. The thin coffee table with slatted wood beneath a wooden bowl full of large, angular rocks and a story for each one of them. Windmill cookies in a jar. The stiff, thin edges of the twin sized quilt that push against my face as I wriggle beneath it preparing for sleep. The china cabinet where–I wouldn’t learn until much later–my surreptitious forays behind those glass-faced doors and into the mint bowl were well known and amusedly expected. 

I find myself smiling. Perhaps it will not be as hard as I had thought. 

These memories are good. I will take them with me. Who needs things when it is the person you care to remember? These are only things. Grandma is not here. They are just things. 

And, yet. 

All the things together are whispering. Of her. Her zest for life. Her touch. Her love. Parts of her will be carried out these doors in the threads of a quilt, the woodgrains of a coffee table, the lingering smell of mint in a china cabinet. With these parts of her, parts of me will follow. She has taken nothing, but much of me will certainly go with her.

I mentally shake myself back to my task. 

I grab a sticky note pad and hastily scribble on the top two sheets: “Not for sale”. Anything they touch will be off limits. I can attach them to anything especially meaningful. Anything really special. Anything that reminds me of her. 

The first thing to catch my eye is Grandma’s roll of snowflake print paper towels. 

Anything to remind me of her? What, here, does not?

I set the sticky notes down and reattach the top sheet, for memories are not choosy in the things to which they attach themselves, and grief has no regard for boxes marked off limits.