The One... The Only... The Vieve

Dust and Memories

I promised myself that before I move again (which will happen in less than two weeks) I would go through my stuff and pitch most of it. I've been throwing odds and ends out for the past week or so--half-empty bottles of cleanser I'll never use, old work files, bacteria-infested old makeup--but today I started with the tough stuff: boxes of mementos and photos and old cards that I hadn't looked at in, I don't know, years, I guess. I pitched a lot of stuff, but there are some things I can't part with: old letters from the Poopyhead, which are always worth rereading; cards from my Aunt Teresa, who passed on a few years ago, much too soon, and who was the toughest, funniest broad I'll ever know; the obituary of my Gramgrace, who, as I grow older, I realize was the source of many of my most endearing and maddening characteristics.

After spending an hour looking through all that stuff--both the "keepers" and the trash--I'm so, so tired. Not that sitting on the floor and shuffling papers is particularly exhausting. But the emotions...crying, laughing, regret, yearning, embarrassment, anger...all contained in pieces of paper and ink. Or, really, not contained in them, but contained in the memories triggered by them. Like Proust's madeleine, but much, much dustier.