Cosas

I have a wierd attachment to stuff. There is nothing like packing up your apartment to remind you of the irrational habits we have when it comes to our personal possessions. I am guilty of keeping little things around, not because I am thrifty or want to avoid waste, but because items that touched someone's hands mean that the person is not so far away from you, even if they have passed on, or moved on. The washcloth that I am taking to Ecuador was purchased for me at the Bodyshop at the Mall of America in Minneapolis, Minnesota by my first girlfriend in 1992. I haven't heard from her since 1994, but I still have this thoughtful little thing she bought for me. It has dolphins on it.

So on one hand, I am a little bit of a pack rat. I keep many things around for way too long. Everyone once awhile, I am vindicated when something that I have kept stuck in a box somewhere comes in handy in practical way. The big padlock my father and I bought to move to New York in 1998 sat in my tool box unused for eight years until I produced it to lock my handy storage space in this building, saving, marvel of marvels, a trip to the hardware store. Because I am a packrat, however, I obsess about finding the right home for the most mundane items, and its not just because if people take things away then I have less to carry to the Goodwill store. I want things to have the right home, and to be of use to the right person. People come to my apartment and find they can't leave empty handed. Lately, friends have been departing under duress with salad bowls, spice racks, the microwave, the toaster oven. One neighbor furnished her daughter's kitchen with the stuff I was getting rid of. Whether her daughter actually wants it or not remains to be seen.

Another friend actually wanted my shower curtains and I threw in a couple towels into the bargain. One of the towels was the sky blue one that my grandmother gave me soon after I moved into my first apartment in 1996. It's an everyday item, but I look at it and remember the bathroom in her house in Hickory, North Carolina, which is no longer standing. How it smelled, how the wood paneling in that room looked, how the door scraped against the dropped ceiling when you opened it all the way. I dropped it into box with everything else I was sending her, and let go of that palpable link to my grandmother. It is a bath towel after all.

By way of my neighbor, I also sent the drill to my ex-boyfriend that he purchased jointly with me in a fit of generosity during the long August afternoon when he helped me put up the closet shelves in this apartment. That was 2004. He's recently married now, so I suppose it functions as a sort of quasi wedding present, although really it's half his, so its not much of a gift. Call it a palpable link to me. A drill. A practical reminder of what turned out to be a hopelessly impractical relationship.