Monday Meander: No roots to show
Monday, July 03, 2006
Bernita's recent couple of posts about attic finds got me thinking again, along with the upcoming move.Seems to me like a lot of folks put quite a bit of stock in attics and the things contained therein. It sounds very poetic, but always a bit unreal to me. As if it's the sort of things people in books do, but not real people. Or maybe just people who are completely unlike me.
For a romance writer, I'm really not very romantic. Even if I encountered these items -- and I have, through the years -- it doesn't make me smile fondly or yearn for a bygone innocence. It's just more stuff to get rid of.
I sometimes fear I'm one of those dreadful modernist minimalists at heart.
My mother is the opposite. I think she still has everything I ever touched. I'm an only child and she is the sixth of seven. That may have something to do with it. That, and she's a packrat -- always hanging on to something because it may come in useful in the future.
Not me, baby. Slash and burn and let the wind carry the ashes away. The past is the past. It can't be changed and I wouldn't if I could. I suprise myself by being a proponent of chaos theory. If one moment of my past was changed, I wouldn't be where and what and who I am right now. At this moment.
A relentless charge forward.
There are so few "things" that mean anything real to me. Bernita's button box holds more than buttons for her. Maybe it's simply that I have so few family ties. I never knew any of my father's family and he's gone now. I know many of my mother's family, but have no real connection to them other than blood. Is that enough?
It occurs to me that maybe it's me. Perhaps it's some quirk of my personality that provides me with so little anchorage.
I do have some ballast to keep me even. My family. My friends. And yet, I am still, in my soul, unencumbered by ... attic finds. Things that tie me to history, to continuity.
So does that set me free, or merely adrift?
7/03/2006 08:30:00 AM : : Sela Carsen : : 2 Comments
2 Comments:
Maybe you just don't attach importance to "things".
They're not really what's important after all.
By 
, at
4:10 AM
To some of us, "things" are just the tactile symbols of what IS really important.
They recall - they do not replace.
