Lampshades and cardigans

TRY picturing for a moment in your mind’s eye, your book collection or your photographs, or for those of us from a certain vintage, your CD collection. Now, imagine, if all the ones we would never read again, nor look at nor listen to, were illuminated on the shelves or in the albums, shining out at us. Chances are it would be the bulk of what we hold so dear.

But we keep them and cherish them. And yet, sooner than we hope, the day will arrive when they are chucked into the skip. No longer will they bare testament to what it was we were, but nonetheless, we gather them and hold them sacred.

We are a collecting species. We struggle to offload. We surround ourselves with a deluge of wrappings and trappings that we feel, say something about who or what we are. Sad isn’t it? Sad that eventually the task will fall to some of our offspring to load up that wheelbarrow and toss away. And as the chains from the lifting lorry rattle and jangle against the sides of the disappearing skip, they are like the last ringing death knell of a life lived. A whole life or lives, off to the landfill graveyard.

Old vases, chipped crockery and one handled pots. Formica, plywood and lino. Lampshades and cardigans. Brown envelopes and paper bags full of receipts and records of the past. Our homes of wallpaper and carpets that held every echo of our being, are stripped, de-cluttered and gutted. Empty and hollow.

In her poem ‘The Lonely House’, Scarlett Treat, an American writer from Jug Fork, Mississippi, describes this emptiness and loss.

The house is empty now,

And lonely in its abandonment. The family who used to be here, The one who kept the house warm, And lived in and loved,

Has gone far, far away.

Death has taken the grandparents, The history keepers, the ones With tales to tell of ‘How it used to be,’ And ‘When I was young!’

And adulthood has moved the children To the distant corners of the world, No longer to be part of the laughter Which kept the house alive and happy. And their children no longer know about The house where love lived,

I guess this inevitability is right up there with death and taxes. Unavoidable. De-hoarding the home of the hoarders and breaking into their many dust-covered personal time-capsules is a poignant time. But it has to be so. Pretty much everything has a lifespan. The seasons come and go and the years roll along, and the wheels keep turning.

Let the sounds of the next generations produce new echoes. Swing on the garden swing again. Believe in the Big Red Man coming down the chimney once more. Looking forward but yet saluting the past is the key, is it not?

Moving in to the next phase, giving the oxygen to the new born and remembering those that went before. This is how Treat concludes her poem. The final line is crucial. Her saying that ‘It hopes’, emphasises that the house never actually died to begin with, but instead, wants, once more, to play it’s part as the Home.

So the house sits, waiting and abandoned, As lonely as only an empty house can be, Windows boarded over, doors locked, Shutters closed, against the time when It hopes someone will return again.

John J Kelly is a multiple award-winning poet from Enniscorthy. He is the co founder of the Anthony Cronin Poetry Award with the Wexford Literary Festival and co-ordinator of poetry workshops for schools locally.

Each week, John’s column will deal mainly with novels, plays and poems from both the Leaving Certificate syllabus and Junior Certificate syllabus.