My husband pointed to a tall, old-fashioned steamer trunk bearing a big, official-looking Swiss customs sticker.
"So much dust," I said through my facemask. Everything lay silent under inch-thick decades of undisturbed white.
We were in the walk-in closet of my childhood bedroom. Each of the four upstairs bedrooms had its own attic closet -- my two sisters, my brother, and I always called these "eaves" because they nestled under the eaves of the house -- and each eave was completely packed.
To get in, Mike had to move a table blocking further entry -- not easy, he's 6'5" -- then push aside a heavy chest of drawers riddled with droppings. ("Looks like a squirrel's been here.") It barely budged. I squeezed into the eight inches between the chest and the insulation to join him. It was sweltering.
I pried open the steamer trunk. On its closet side were neatly hung clothes in perfect condition, from my mother's old fur coat to a pair of her pajamas I remembered well. Small drawers were filled with tiny, exquisitely smocked linens.
"Our baby clothes!" I exclaimed.
The trunk had followed us a long way. It went with us when the family moved to Switzerland in 1952. It came back with us when we moved to Cleveland in 1954. Then in 1959, it had been moved to this house near Philadelphia, where my parents have lived ever since.
All without ever having been unpacked.
In fact, it seems nobody had opened it for 60 years, until that blistering summer day in 2011 when I did, while helping my parents get ready to move to a continuing care community three miles away. They were 87 and 89.
They'd put down a deposit on a retirement community.
We're not a family that talks. You definitely weren't allowed to discuss where they might move or plans for when they got older. So it was completely surprising, though also pretty typical, when, without any conversation at all, I got a call on my cell that they'd put down a deposit on a retirement community.
"If we sell the house, we might move," they told us.
That was May. Seizing the opportunity (it had to happen eventually), my siblings and I quickly set ourselves a mid-August deadline to pack everything.
The care community provided a list of resources to help us, including a realtor who warned that the house would have to be emptied before it sold, and resources to make it happen. Moving Solutions, a senior relocation company, helped us organize all the different levels of removal: an eBay specialist who sold some items, an organization that identified clothes and books for charity, an auctioneer, and finally a junk person to clear out what remained. It was expensive, but proceeds kept coming in that paid for the services, so my parents never felt like it was more than they could afford. With all of us living in different states, we could never have done it on our own.
But first we had to decide what to keep. And that was hard.
I'd always dreaded this process.
I knew it would be a terrible loss, giving up this family home after so long. A large, five-bedroom house built at the end of the 19th century, it had once been part of a larger estate in a rural area -- you drive through stone pillars at the entrance. My parents had five acres, including a large wooded lot, gardens, a barn where they once kept pet horses, paddocks, a garage, and a pool that hadn't been usable in years.
"Mom, let's go through these dining room drawers," I suggested. I thought placemats and tablecloths would be an easy place to start.
I tugged open the first drawer -- silverware. The next, more silver. In minutes, I covered the entire dining room table, with its extensions open, with pieces of silver, most of which I'd never seen before.
"Mom! What's all this?"
"It was your grandmother's, or your great-aunt's."
"Have you ever used it?"
She shrugged.
That's when I began to get a real sense of what had been going on for years. My parents had accumulated stuff and never dealt with it. They'd never given anything to charity. They never threw anything away -- not even the mail or the magazines that kept coming in.
Stuff in every drawer, closet, cupboard, nook, and cranny.
None of us had really noticed just how much stuff was accumulating over time. When my grandmother died in 1982, and my great-aunt in 1985, most of their enormous estates were absorbed wholesale into my parents' house, stuffed into every drawer, closet, cupboard, nook, and cranny. We visited, but we didn't think about it -- the house was so big and old, and so cluttered already.
But now that we were faced with packing it up, we were seeing it anew. In the middle of a crazy-hot summer, in an old house without air conditioning. Dust and heat and sweat and stuff, so much stuff.
There was another feeling, too -- amazement. Amid all the hauling and sorting, there were treasures. I teach history at a university. My work is in the 17th century, but we historians can't help but be interested in all history. And here was my history.
My school science projects. Every stitch of clothing, including all my grandmother's dresses. Boxes of my grandfather's National Geographics. Three generations of French and math textbooks.
My father's flight manual from the Naval Air Corps in WWII. A copy of Little Women, inscribed to my grandmother by her father for her tenth birthday in 1902. A wedding dress whose owner we still haven't identified -- but I'm working on it. It went on and on.
"Know anything about this one?" asked my husband, hauling yet another chest down the stairs from my old bedroom on a 90-degree day.
"Not really. It was left to me by my great-aunt a long time ago."
He removed its marble top to make it lighter and a note fluttered out: This chest belonged to my great, great-grandmother and is from Hudson, New York. I now live about an hour from Hudson. The original owner of that chest is buried there. So are many other relatives; I've been to that cemetery.
As I packed the chest to go home with me, I couldn't help thinking, "The chest is coming home."
Getting it done.
My parents remained passive and overwhelmed all summer. We took turns coming home to keep the process moving.
My mother wouldn't let anybody touch her papers or her clothes. In fact, she barely showed the slightest interest in packing. She would agree to plans for friends or professionals to help her sort her things, but then she'd keep them waiting for an hour and a half while she dawdled over breakfast. She didn't want to do it. And she never really did; it was handled for her.
My father let us help him go through his den and enjoyed answering our questions. Then the move manager gave us all colored dots to put on the items we wanted. My father did this -- but afterward he was unsettled. He seemed to think he hadn't held on to everything he needed, but he wouldn't tell us more.
My parents couldn't quite get their heads around the fact that these were hard choices that needed to be made. It wasn't just age. They hadn't made these decisions during their whole lives, and they didn't in the end, either.
Now their possessions have found new homes. It was exhausting work, but there were many silver linings. For example, those fabulous baby clothes found in the old steamer trunk? I had them cleaned and sent them to a cousin who'd just had a baby. New memories for a new generation.
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