It's the Little Things

Our house if full of the sugar and spice from Monta's being

Just a few objects that remind me of my late wife.

If you saw the movie Field of Dreams, you will remember the character Terence Mann describing how visitors to Kevin Costner’s baseball field (carved out of a cornfield) would experience a moment where memories of their past would rush to them as in a flood.

For me, I am experiencing such floods of memory as I go through drawers and boxes, tossing this, saving that.

My wife loved boxes and small containers. Also baskets and small bowls that would be just right to hold even smaller trinkets. So I am finding earrings, hair clips and what not as I try to reorganize our stuff.

One of her small sets of drawer.

Boxes etc.

So it was that I was rummaging through a box of what looked lke junk and found the items shown above A set of small screwdrivers, a lifetime supply of eyeglass screws, several old pairs of glasses and a necklace - really just a delicate chain.

Together they form a portrait, at least a sketch.

The chain brings a flood of memories. Also the reminder that I need to look carefully before I toss anything so I must behave like an archeologist at a dig - don’t want to miss the small stuff.

We only have a son. That is fine but if we had a daughter, she might do a much better job going through all of it. Monta missed not having a daughter to dress up in frilly things - even as she loved our son and did a yeoman’s job raising him when we were poor - and we were poor for the first 10 years of marriage. But who should get Monta’s cherished items? Not really meant for a boy. Oh well.

Perhaps all husbands find in their wives a softness or delicacy that is beguiling. When we met, I was 6’ 3” and loomed over Monta who was 5’ at best. Her style was plain but carefully put together. Her hair cut was simple too - though she did have a permanent once or twice in the early years but mostly a simple cut and she used a variety of hair clips to keep it all in place.

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Are we even allowed to characterize women as delicate? Can we admit that men and women operate on different scales of size and weight? So my big feet would trip over her throw rugs and I would stumble over a small table that Monta found at a Goodwill and was now in our living room. Monta was actually strong for her height and sex and so quite able to haul a chair home from a Good Will. But I was still the big man and demonstrated the gallantry that presumably even now women expect. (If they no longer do, please forgive me.)

Then there were her glasses. If I was a latecomer to eyeglasses, Monta was a pro. She started wearing glasses at age 3 or 4 and wore them all day except in bed or in the shower, hence the lifetime supply of eyeglass screws. Also the old frames. She never knew when an old frame would come in handy.

Of course I will keep all of these.

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We were visual people. Both trained artists.

Monta curated every space in the house as she would an exhibition. Or perhaps as Cezanne would have laid out the objects for a still life. It is not easy to describe what is different from just piling books and nicknacks on shelves, and curating but our house was curated.

Here we have a bookshelf where my wife added a basket and a bit of pottery. Also a walking stick.

Here in a corner to the right of the kitchen stove sat this little piglet atop a small chest of drawers, sitting on a granite counter.

Next is a small bronze statue of the Blessed Virgin. Monta was not religious but this was the one memento she took after my mother died. It is tiny, maybe 4 inches tall.

There is so much more.. and I will never understand all of it.

The cancer stopped my wife cold. And by the 3rd year the living room had become a sick room - and some of her hard work was undone.

Hence my returning to the memories.