Twelve years in a house plus my mother’s twenty-something years in it before that adds up to a significant amount of stuff.
I started in the kitchen, which was the room I knew best. The cabinets held things she’d had since before I was born — a set of mixing bowls that I remembered from childhood, a hand mixer, an enormous stock pot that she’d used for making soup and that no one had used for soup in probably three years but that she’d kept because it was a good pot. I kept the mixing bowls. I donated the stock pot to the church’s meal program, which felt right.
The bookshelves in the living room were ordered in Ruth Bennett’s system, which was by genre and within genre by author’s last name, with a separate section for books she’d gotten as gifts and hadn’t read but felt obligated to keep. I went through them shelf by shelf. The unread gifts went to the library sale. The rest I went through slowly, pulling each one out and looking at the inside covers, because she had a habit of writing her name and the year she’d bought or received a book in the front matter. It turned into a kind of timeline. Here was a book from 1978, before I was born. Here was one from 1991, I would have been seven. Here was one from last year, a novel someone had recommended and she’d been meaning to start.
She had dog-eared the last page she’d read in the novel. Page forty-three.