-
“I don’t even like the tea set.”
Now this is how you do guilt. Of her dead mother’s furniture, Bonnie Barrett Stretch says,
“I felt responsible for them — my mother had taken such good care of them, so naturally I had to, or I wouldn’t be a good daughter,” she says. “I guess my relationship with the furniture was something like my relationship with her; I was never sure that I was good enough.”
And this is how you do creepy.
Courtney Monroe, 42, a homemaker in Clayton, Del., has a massive mahogany sideboard in her dining room. On top of it are a silver tea set and silver candlesticks, set up in exactly the same way they were when they belonged to her grandmother and later her father, now both dead.
“I don’t even like the tea set,” Mrs. Monroe says, “but it goes with the sideboard, because that’s where it was when I grew up.”
This makes me mostly glad that there aren’t any pieces I really want to inherit. All the stuff from my childhood is gone, dispersed to Salvation Army, relatives’ houses, or the garbage.
None of it would go with my aesthetic, anyway, but if it were here, you can be sure that my great big sense of obligation would want to keep it in the apartment.
And even if it came with a four-story townhouse (which it wouldn’t), living intimately with other people’s history is just not for me.