Bryna Kranzler is a graduate of Barnard College (BA, Playwriting) and Yale University School of Management (MBA). She is the author of the historical biography, The Accidental Anarchist, and the forthcoming reference book: 9 Critical Steps to Successful Self-Publishing.
Locker of Lost Dreams
Bryna Kranzler
May/June 2016
At a stage in life when my friends and their husbands were buying second homes or visiting their adult children, I was starting over, going through a divorce that required me to sell my house and most of its contents. Whatever I chose to keep had to fit into a fifty square-foot storage locker, a size chosen based on how much I was willing to pay rather than how much space I needed for the remnants of over thirty years of married life. Each time I slid aside the mesh grate, unlocked the padlock, and rolled up the corrugated metal door of the storage unit, I was assaulted by the exhalation of the memories accumulated within. And each time I added a box to storage, I removed another that I realized I couldn’t afford to keep.
Though I’d jettisoned so many formerly beloved objects, my storage unit was nearly overflowing with items my sons, both young men, had asked me to preserve for them. And while I (and even they) knew that by the time they had homes of their own, they likely wouldn’t want their old football jerseys or fingerboard skate parks, I wouldn’t preemptively impose that forfeiture upon them. After all, the divorce, the sale of our home, and the dissolution of the family unit were losses for them, too.
I had also saved mementos they would surely tell me not to keep: formerly beloved stuffed animals, Dr. Seuss books, and old baseball and Pokemon cards. I was not so much preserving memories of a past as protecting one vision of a future that hadn’t been taken away – the thought of, one day, having a grandchild excited by the idea of going through Grandma’s garage in search of treasure. Maybe one of those obscure baseball players will have become famous for something other than his playing skill, and his old card will be valuable. More likely, that future grandchild will be excited to find his father’s report card from his own age and delight in discovering that Dad, too, sometimes had trouble paying attention in class.
Reducing a lifetime to fifty square-feet was more emotionally than physically challenging. Not only were there constant decisions to make – keep, discard, sell, donate, replace – but context had changed what were once reminders of happier times into totems of pain. I could no longer look at the Lalique Lovebirds Ring Tray that we had bought on our honeymoon. It was small enough to keep, but looking at the delicate frosted-glass lovebirds locked in an eternal kiss only reminded me of a time when we knew with absolute certainly that we would live our entire lives together, and whoever passed away second would do so out of heartbreak.
Other perfectly functional and utilitarian items that I had bought to prepare special meals to delight my former husband were no longer emotionally neutral. A small kitchen torch for crisping the sugar crust on crème brûlée and browning meringue; a wooden drying rack (that kept collapsing) for drying my own creations of homemade pasta; and exotic ingredients for his favorite dessert, rice pudding, would be sold with the house, along with the Lalique Lovebirds, to free me from the memories they carried.
But I wasn’t prepared to come across a small, slightly bent, hand-shaped cookie cutter based on a tracing of one of my son’s hands. That hand, which was now larger than my own, used to clutch my own for security. I hadn’t appreciated the sweetness of the gesture at the time because I was simply too tired. But it also resurrected feelings of guilt over having given too much of my attention to my husband and not enough to my children.
The emotions triggered by items that represented a lifetime of family history brought my packing to a standstill, but with the deadline to move out fast approaching, I called my best friend, who spent an entire weekend with me making decisions. She knew what I valued and what I couldn’t bear to keep, even if the same objects would make no sense to anyone else. She tried to prevent me from getting rid of certain decorative pieces whose loss I might regret later – after all, they represented my history, too – but I couldn’t always accept her guidance. To protect myself going forward, I had to give up much of my own past as it had been so thoroughly commingled with my former husband’s.
Despite how well she knew me, not even my dear friend could advise me what to do with a box of love letters written nearly forty years ago. Would holding on to them perpetuate the misguided belief I maintained that I could fix the relationship by myself, or would I be trying to convince myself that our love had once been reciprocal, despite what I question now?
Ultimately, I decided not to decide. I secured the box with packing tape and buried it behind other boxes so that I wouldn’t come across it until the next time I moved — by which time, perhaps, the pain wouldn’t be as acute, or the box would simply disappear as things do during such transitions.
After finally shedding the weighty cloak of the past and moving into a rental, I shouldn’t have been surprised to discover that I no longer had the types of personal items that make a house a ‘home.’ While friends’ homes are decorated with souvenirs of their travels together or other items of shared importance, I bought furniture on consignment that came with someone else’s discarded history. At one consignment store, I found two semi-circular end tables that, when pushed together, looked like Tweedle Dum or Tweedle Dee. Although I hadn’t been looking for end tables, they made me smile so I brought them home.
Like me, those tables and my various other castoffs now have a chance to create a new history, one based on the people I invite into and who are eager to be part of my new life. And people who have been to my new as well as my former home have remarked how much my current home reflects my personality – an accumulation of diverse experiences and an open mind for what is to follow.
Though there are items I miss from my former life, paring down my possessions to what suits me now introduced me to something that I hadn’t even known was missing: the sound of my own voice.