Worldly Goods

Mom cleans my jewelry

What of all your worldly goods do you pull from the charred and soggy embers of your home if given the chance? At that moment, it was just a drawer full of jewelry: some bought at estate sales, some gifted by people special to me. They're not quite diamonds, or even almost diamonds, but they’re diamonds to me.

The Coroner had come and gone, and the young fireman preceded me up the stairs. My door and Marks stood wide open (mine white, his charred black). The entire roof had caved in on both our homes, and we carefully walked back towards the bedroom. I handed him a shopping bag and pointed to the chest of drawers. While he did that, I upended the trunk full of family pictures hoping they would survive, until I could get help to rescue it. I noticed the laundry I’d been sorting and put 4 pair of jeans over my arm.

As we passed the kitchen, I grabbed another ecco-grocery bag hanging on the pantry door. I stepped across the soggy kitchen floor and took the bottle of Tito’s vodka my sister had brought me from Atlanta, back out in the hallway, I took the sparkly ruby slipper shining from the bookcase shelf full of soggy books and put it in the bag.

Nothing else caught my eye, except the tall black statue that was a gift from Mark a year back. The fireman and I descended the stairs, and I was instantly engulfed in hugs. Patti and Ree were there. I turned to respond to a woman frantically asking, “where’s Mark?” My shaking head and face said it all and as she burst into tears, I realized too late, it was Mark’s mother. I felt bad; I felt insensitive, but there are no right words to say that unsayable truth. I still didn’t believe it myself. We hugged; she cried; I cried.  Her husband came, and then more family. They took her home.

I just wanted to get in the car and drive away, too. I still stood with the myriad things that must be done. Give names and details to the fire chief and the police and formally request copies of their reports. They would not be ready for well over a week. Pick up Jazmine from the Parcak's house.

Patti and Ree walked with me to the car I’d re-parked in front of Greg and Sarah’s house. We put everything in the trunk and said goodbyes. I was still on automatic pilot; go to the store for cat food and litter for Jaz, beer, toothbrush, toothpaste for me, pick up Jaz.  They say you can't go home again, but where do you go when you've lost all your worldly goods and the roof over your head.  Of all the offers of sanctuary I had, there was only one real choice.  I poured me a go cup, strapped Jaz's carrier in the passenger seat and headed home to Mom's house in Hoover.

Next: Back to the Scene

Let’s Get Organized - Yeah, Sure!

I’ve read all the articles; I know all the rules. In some areas of my life, I succeed. By the door are 2 terra cotta white wine chillers. They were gifts from some people who know I drink wine, but didn’t pay attention to one small detail. I only drink red wine. I found that their absorptive nature makes them the perfect container for wet umbrellas.

Also by the door is a large basket holding anything that needs to go out the door when next I go out the door to the car: library books, a spare hammer for my mom, magazines to pass along, etc. Across from the door is the entry table. This gets keys, sunglasses, change, outgoing mail, post-it notes and a pen for messages or notes to self to immediately stick on the door, so I don’t forget my take-alongs. The

roomy top drawer holds my purse on the right, and stamps, envelopes, return l abel s, and pens on the left.

Some areas of my life just flat defy organization. My studio is one of them. My

writing space is another. Oh, and then there's the coffee table.

Organization here is a

goal, a carrot, make that, the perfect double dark chocolate truffle, in the distance. No matter how hard I try, I never quite reach it.

It is said that the destination is not as important as the journey, so I'll keep on traveling and reaching for that distant truffle.

© Perle Champion

There’s No Place Like Home - Journal Entry

Home, but I am still haunted by the Estate Sale.  How does one write away this day? The wine runs warm in my veins, as I wander from room to room. I touch the embroidered duvet that holds my down comforter on the futon that is my bed.

I glance and smile at the small altar with flickering candle in the corner of the room, touch the bar by the kitchen where I sit most mornings and sip coffee from an old gilt-edged cup, eat breakfast and pat cat who sits on the stool beside me. I remind myself as I pass through the dining room, that I really should refinish the pub table and chairs someday. I’ve been going to do it for 10 years.

The old couch in the living room – comfortable from day one – is still sturdy, if a little worn. How many books have I read curled up in one corner of it or another? The bentwood rocker, where I rocked Dawn, now grown and gone her own way, is now the cat's favorite perch. She leaps up and settles to rock and then does it again and again. I pass the old chair made of 2X4’s with a macramé seat holding a queen-sized pillow in red silk slip. I made it for my first apartment. A single mom at 18, I could just afford a real bed for the kid and not much for me. The large glass coffee table strewn with memories on its second shelf: mouth blown glass fishermen’s’ floats collected at the beach so long ago, a wizard carved in wood with a staff in his hand, my very own crystal ball and far too many books.


I make my way to and through the French doors to the table and chair on the balcony. It’s wrought iron and wooden with canvas covered seats I made myself. I sit, pen in hand to blank page to write away the day and nothing comes.

How does one write away a day like this? To know that all my treasures will one day be another’s trash. I cannot get this morning’s estate sale out of my mind.

The house was just over off Elm and Monroe – the big pink monstrosity Ba and I so often joked about. We’d gone to many such sales. The elderly in this quiet Virginia-Highland neighborhood are of an age where deaths are frequent. Today’s sale in the old pink house was different. The old woman sat there at the table next to her daughter and the woman running the sale and watched with eyes glazed and knowing, as we strangers fingered first this, then that.

How must she feel to watch all she owns and holds dear parceled out at pennies on the dollar – sold to strangers? How many family dinners did she prepare on that old stove? Which of the handmade aprons on the rack at a dollar apiece did she wear and wash and iron with care most often? How many children’s tears did she wipe away with its hem? How often was each one blessed with cookie dust and messy-mouthed hugs?

I know we shouldn’t be slaves to possessions – mere things mean nothing – I wonder.

The iron bed in the corner of her bedroom looks so very old; its tired mattress has a hollow place down its very center. Once she lay with a husband there and perhaps birthed and nursed this daughter sitting beside her – now grown, gavel in hand – going, going, gone.

Without a biographer for our lives, all we leave behind are things that chronicle our passage. But few will know and fewer remember, if I don’t tell them, the importance of each piece. I say importance, but their only value is to me – they are a gentle prod to memory of a life lived. It is the memory that is dear to the soul. Sell them or give them away when I’m gone – when she’s gone. But to have her sit and watch – how cruel is that?

The thoughts were there this morning, as I walked from room to room in that house. I knew what I would write – the words flowing through my head sounded so profound. But as I sit here now with pen in hand, as night creeps toward me, those words have fled on down the road as if they’d never been – perhaps to someone who would give them immediate attention and not dawdle over other things.

Now of the thousand thoughts I had this morning, all are gone and I sit here with an empty page and fill it with feelings roughly cobbled into word after word hoping to shake loose a few gems still lingering somewhere deep within that would end this piece brilliantly. But I have none of my own; I can only think of that line from a childhood movie.

"There's no place like home."

© Perle Champion