I was cleaning the Small Child’s room tonight and came across (as you do) a little cardboard box full of his ‘treasures’. It contained some mismatched bits of broken toys, some leads for a Pacer style pencil and a few coins and a strange die. I opened it and asked the Small Child if it was rubbish and should we throw it out?
The look on his face was hard to describe… it wasn’t consternation or distress… it was more… incredulity really. He was looking at me as though he couldn’t believe that I couldn’t tell that these were his special things. He had something to say about each item in his little stash and it was quite obvious that these things were in there for their sentimental value. One item I had given him when I came home from a trip, another was part of something he made with his teacher, the die came from one of his father’s games etc.
No doubt he gets this from his mother. Because while I abhor clutter in my house I tend to sentimentalize certain knick-knacks and make souvenirs out of strange things that remind me of people, places or events, and these things could never be thrown away.
Finding the delicate balance between clutter and order is a particular Borys’ weirdness. I often walk into my home and look around feeling slightly claustrophobic and twitchy that there’s too much stuff in the house and not enough clean empty surfaces. Yet I’m the one who has decorated the place to have an ‘old English study’ kinda feel… dark burgundy carpets, leather wingback chair, lots of warm timber furniture, plenty of (very organized) bookcases, stained glass lightshades, prints and mirrors in heavy gilt frames. So I’ve not exactly gone for a modern minimalist feel that is more conducive to producing clear surfaces.
I have many things in my house which have many special meanings or associations. Just take my desk for example… there’s a cup from the DMZ in North Korea that I keep pens and pencils in. There’s a Marinoni pewter hourglass (a more useless item you’d be hard pressed to find) that I bought for myself on a ‘cheer-me-up-IVF-sucks’ shopping trip in 2004. Some shells from Vanuatu. A fifty rupee note from Pakistan. A Tudor Rose paperweight from Hampton Court Palace in 1997. Some little glass mushrooms from an artist at the Salamanca Markets in 1994, a heavy glass globe I bought in Prague and then lugged around for the next six months, a rock I pciked up off the ground at Gallipoli and several other bits and bobs that have been collected throughout my travels.
But the most sentimental item on my desk is a pair of tiny Swarovski crystal mushrooms, one of which is broken, that was a gift from my first boyfriend back in 1988…. so I can see where the Small Child gets his habit of making treasures from little broken bits of toys. And while I often pine for clean and clear surfaces the urge to discard and cull is always overcome by the need to keep my precious broken memories intact.
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