Facing Accumulations

     Over the Thanksgiving weekend I started what I thought would be a fairly quick project: clearing some of the blackberries inching towards the road and our driveway. In recent months they were not just blocking the view of the road, the tangled wall of accumulated vines was creating a downright claustrophobic, almost forbidding entrance: a narrow cave of green walls.
     The thing is, once you start such a project, where does it end? In truth, it doesn't. Once blackberries get started, only Mother Nature can tame them and even she gets frustrated with the little buggers.

     At the same time I began hacking into the  enormous accumulation of vines, my youngest sister was 1400 miles away at our mother's  home in Colorado, delving into a houseful of "stuff" accumulated over four generations. Our 90-year-old Mom is planning to move from the house she grew up in to a nearby retirement center. Between childhood and moving back into that house, she lived in four other countries and three states, accumulating many things along the way. She, my sister, and later our other sister, spent days going through drawers, closets, cupboards--entire rooms--of things that seemed important to keep, at least at one time, by someone in the family.

It's hard to throw away electrical items (vacuums, radios, kitchen appliances) that at one time could be fixed. Alas, those days are gone but the habit of saving for repair is a hard one to break. 'Surely we'll find someone to do it,' is a persistent voice. It's even harder to dispose of items that have sentimental value, but you have no room for and rarely see anyway, except in fits of cleaning out every year or three.
      "After I'm gone, someone will have to clean all that stuff out of the basement," Mom has joked for years. Her mother had said the exact same thing. We chuckled, in the smug comfort that the next generation would have to do it. Well, she's not gone, it's time to do it and she gets to help.

     So, as I clipped long- neglected vines three times my height, my family burrowed into decades of family

Bundled blackberries

history.  The vines stretched high into trees; I yanked them down, folded them, thick end first, into 8-12-inch pieces (Yes, it requires thick gloves.Very thick gloves.), then wrapped them with the supple tendril at the end and tossed them in piles. My sisters and Mom yanked open stuck drawers and doors, pulling out long-forgotten items, deciding what to do and forming their piles. My piles were to compost or burn, theirs were to keep, sell, donate or send to the landfill. What would Mom want to take with her? Who in the family would like to have this?  While they were indoors and I was outdoors in the cold (actually good having several layers of clothing when dealing with nasty thorns), I think their job was more exhausting. Studies have shown that the more decisions we have to make in a day, even simple ones, the more our mental and physical strength is zapped.

One side done, the other awaits.

 

It seemed the more berry vines I cut back, the more I discovered behind them , but I did make progress and it's satisfying to see the road now - at least on one side of the drive. The other side awaits...

 
 
       My sister returned to her home in California, understandably exhausted and feeling both accomplishment at what got done and the momentum she leaves behind for the others, but frustration that she didn't get as much done as she'd intended. I hope in a few days she can look back and realize she broke through a wall of sorts - the kind created by the mental block of where to start, what to do with all of the stuff we've poked through over the decades, able then to walk away and say, "later." How do you sort and dispose of the little things that mark lives and time, people and events, feelings and relationships? There's so much history in that house, meaningful to only our family. Bits of it will disperse into the homes of other family members, bringing memories of times and people with them. Others will go into the homes of strangers. But, soon enough, they'll be gone through again as each family moves.

     Like the blackberry vines that never give up, their roots traveling unseen, underground, the "stuff" in our lives vine through numerous homes and generations, each with a memory, each with a story we want to remember.