They Don’t Want My Cherished Treasures

I have downsized. 

Repeatedly.

At one time I owned seven sets of dishes. Yes, seven. And that doesn't count the two sets of Christmas dishes. Before you call the china police, there was a reason. Ralph and I entertained. A lot.

Our cooking club

We had dinner parties. Holiday dinners. Summer parties, large and small, that spilled out onto the decks and into the yard. We had enough outdoor furniture to seat a small municipality. I set tables with placemats and cloth napkins and flowers and wine glasses. I apparently believed that every meal deserved its own coordinating dishware.

(lower deck)

(upper deck)

   

(off the lower deck to tiny yard)

And I loved it.

One of our sets of Christmas dishes was a wedding gift from Ralph's mother. That sentence alone explains why I still own them. They aren't just plates. They come with a person attached.

Christmas

Make your own sushi party

That's the trouble with getting rid of things when you're older.

Everything comes with somebody attached.

I've already done the serious downsizing. Most of those seven sets of dishes are long gone. What remains is our everyday stuff, the two Christmas sets, and what I still call the good stuff.

Except now I'm living with millennials.

I've been living with my family for ten years, and in all that time I don't think they've ever had people over. For anything, let alone for dinner.

Not once.

This is baffling to a woman who once considered having the right cloth cocktail napkins a basic life skill. To be fair, at this point we couldn’t entertain if we wanted to.

Our dining area contains a full-size freezer because two teenage eating machines live here. Beside the freezer are fishing poles and soccer balls. There is a bicycle. An electric scooter is plugged in somewhere among all of this.

And, as I write this, the bench seat from our 2014 Honda Odyssey is sitting in front of the fireplace.

Martha Stewart does not live here.

Once upon a time, I worried about whether the napkins coordinated with the placemats. Today, I would just be happy if nobody had to move a soccer ball to get to the freezer.

Somewhere in storage my good china is waiting patiently for civilization to return.

But they don't want my good china. They don't want the silver. They don't want the serving pieces. I'm fairly certain that if I left them a handwritten inventory explaining the provenance of every platter and gravy boat, they would use it to locate the nearest Goodwill.

I don't blame them. Well, perhaps three percent of me blames them.

Their lives are different. Entertaining is different. Homes are different. Families are different. Nobody seems terribly interested anymore in owning a special plate that must be hand-washed and carefully returned to a quilted storage case so it can wait eleven months for another appearance.

Come to think of it, that's a fairly ridiculous job description for a plate.

But here's the part I'm struggling with:

I don't necessarily want the things anymore, either. I want what happened around them.

I want the Christmas table with every chair occupied. I want friends arriving through the door. I want Ralph there. I want the summer evening when people wandered from one deck to another with a drink in their hands. I want the anticipation of setting the table before everyone arrived.

And Goodwill, annoyingly, does not have a donation category for that.

So I'm downsizing again.

This time I'm going through the things that survived all the previous purges precisely because they weren't stuff. They were treasures.

Some I'll keep. Some I'll sell. Some I'll give away. And I'll probably pick up each one and tell myself its entire life story before I let it go.

Because apparently that's how I downsize.

One memory at a time.

Condo when Ralph and I lived there