Gonna Take a Sentimental Journey
I know it’s not quite the Spring Equinox yet, but Easter comes early this year—the earliest it can ever be according to The Rules for Determining Easter Sunday Dates— and two red-breasted robins were pecking at the grass yesterday, so I’m pretending it’s spring already.
With thoughts of spring comes the overwhelming desire to purge my house of clutter. Some people are purgers by nature; others have to work at it. I was born into it, the product of a Marine Corps childhood and a Navy marriage. There is no escape. If the robins are singing, it MUST be time for a good “sort out,” as the British say.
So I dig my way through drawers, shuffle through the closets, linger over the bookshelves, and ask myself, “Do I really NEED this [fill in the blank] in my life?” If there is any hesitation whatsoever, out it goes.
“Need” of course is a relative term. What you need to sustain your life may not fit my needs at all. Books, for example, fill a basic need and are like, well, friends, or at least the characters are. I would sooner throw out my son’s baseball card collection—at great personal peril, I might add—than throw out Little Women, Charlotte’s Web, Gone with the Wind, Crocodile on the Sandbank, A Morbid Taste for Bones, The Complete Sherlock Holmes, The Collected Dorothy Parker, or my Riverside Shakespeare.
So there is always room for sentiment.
Sentiment is a luxury when you move every two years, but I know one Army wife who lovingly and painstakingly packed her antique crystal chandeliers for every move, even to and from Germany. That is dedication to sentiment and family ties, my friends. She is not a purger, I can tell you that, but the chandeliers survived into retirement and sparkle to this day in her home.
Even though I have no heirloom chandeliers, I, too, wax nostalgic over certain things that never get tossed: albums filled with, among more modern photos, Kodak “Instamatic” pictures, taken with a flash device called Magic Cubes, and neatly tucked into black corners; an old garnet ring; a forest green chenille “W” once worn on a white sweater; a cotillion dance card filled with names long ago forgotten; a high school tennis racquet whose head is the size of a salad plate it’s that old; wedding shoes of pearlized leather; assorted Navy insignia and a sword mounted over the fireplace; hand-written notes by a long-grown five-year-old; and a child’s blanket that pushes the bounds of sanitation despite a thousand washings.
If Spring Cleaning is on the schedule, it’s also time to watch college baseball, and as I prepare to go down to Florida for the last time to see my Amherst senior son play his last Spring Break of tropical hardball, I’m starting to get sentimental over the end of an era. No more school uniforms with school logos sewn on; no more cleats, muddy socks, or sweaty ball caps thrown in the back of the van accompanied by the distinctive sound of baseball bats colliding in a duffle, all followed by the urgent demand, “Feed me! I’m starved!”
A trip to Amherst, Massachusetts in April will afford me a final double-header as the Lord Jeffs (yes, that’s the team name; we usually just yell, “Go, Amherst!”) take on arch rival Williams. I’ll eat it up, I guarantee it, take lots of pictures for those albums that will hang around forever, and perhaps bring home a ball with all the guys’ signatures on it. For posterity, of course, something that will never succumb to the urge to purge.
And, as I sit wrapped in “The Ugly Baseball Quilt,” my bottom numbed beyond all hope on Amherst’s steel bleachers, a last round of cold-weather baseball will remind me why sentiment only goes so far in my world --but it’s always a journey worth taking.
Karla Kraynak Bruno
Author of Mischiefs and Miseries: a novel of
Published March 19, 2008, The Virginia Gazette, Williamsburg, Virginia