A different sort of Monday Musings this week …

My reading group’s June book is Edwina Preston’s Bad art mother, which was published by Wakefield Press last year and which I’ll be reviewing soon. (If you don’t know it and are interested, you can check out Lisa’s review.) It was shortlisted this year for the Christina Stead Prize for Fiction (in the New South Wales Premier’s Literary Awards) and for the Stella Prize. Wakefield Press’s website describes it as being “set in the Melbourne milieu of Georges and Mirka Mora, Joy Hester, and John and Sunday Reed”. The same milieu, in fact, that inspired Emily Bitto’s The strays (my review) although that’s a very different book. However, I digress … because my little question for you today is not central to the book, just something that caught my attention. It comes from Owen talking to his aunt:

Why did you throw out everything when you sold the house in Coburg, Ornella? Was it because you knew all those things didn’t matter in the end, that without memories attached they were just junk shop rubbish? You put Nonna’s things out on the grass for the neighbours to pick through. You didn’t even keep a teapot, or a pair of earrings. You filled your place with glossy new things … But what are you now without all those things?

There’s a bit more, but the question Owen asks is one I’ve been confronting in my current big downsizing project – a project that is almost done, thank goodness. Still, it has been difficult, a wrench, to part with things that are part of the story of my life, things I haven’t used in decades but that, every time I see them, remind me of some person or event. They gave me joy, so Marie Kondo’s criterion just didn’t work!

However, to use a cliche, you can’t take them with you, and we don’t want to leave more of a headache to our kids than we have to, so decisions had to be made. And, they have been. I do expect some gnashing of teeth in the future, as well as some “I kept that!”, but overall I think we’ve done ok. My choices were not based on value, but on meaning, so out went some fine art porcelain and in stayed Mum’s funny little no-brand donkey that she kept with her through her many moves, for as long as I can remember. I never did ask her why – why didn’t I? – but I couldn’t let it go. And, of course, I kept her copy of Pride and prejudice.

I could go on, sharing all my little decisions, but will leave it there, and return to the opening question: what do our things mean to us, and does letting them go change who we are?

What do you think?