A Few of My Favorite Things

Yesterday, we took the Christmas decorations down.  Some people might think this is late, but the house rule is that they can't be up by Valentines Day--and we have missed that mark by several weeks and are feeling pretty good about that.

But I always feel a little sad about taking down Christmas decorations.  In large part the sadness comes from the house being all plan and ordinary again without twinkle lights and the sparkly tinsel tree--and yet days are still short and drear outside. (we should have specially decorated homes all winter long, durn it!)  But Christmas ornaments also bring back so many memories of Dan's and my early years together and of people who have given us or made us ornaments.  Decorating the tree in my house (and then again in my parent's home) is always half decorating chore and larger half conversation about the history of all of the ornaments and the people to whom their attached.  And so, packing all of that away, feels like packing those memories away, too, for another ten months.  If decorating is celebration, undecorating feels a little like mourning.

So, this go around, I decided to immediately take quick stock of the year round decoration that I have clearly been taking for granted.  My house is filled with objects that are there precisely because they make me happy or are attached to memories and people that I love. Take the display portion of our hutch for example:

Filled with artwork from friends, driftwood from walks, childhood toys, a few pieces that belonged to my grandparents and remind me of them now that I have lost them all, items that Dan and I have picked up in our ten year life together.  Not the usual stuff maybe to keep in a velvet-lined hutch commissioned and handmade by a french cabinet maker for my Great great aunt (oh the literally rich history of my family. . . we are lesser people now, but still have a few spoils of the heyday), but it's many of my most valuable belongings and so I keep them behind lock and key.

My favorite shelf in the hutch:

 

1. Old books--Grandpa Hartsock collected old books and was quite a reader.  I got a lot of his    collection when he passed on.
2. A glass ornament that my parents gave us that is too dear and too fragile to trust to a wobbly tree.
3. Two tiny people and a shark head all made by one of my best friends, Casey Millard--pieces that suggest the larger body of her amazing work.
4. A little wooden elephant that my friend Alex sent me long long ago from Germany.  Back then, we were huge letter writers.  I miss that.
5. A tiny chair made out of the wire from a champagne bottle.  I've made those for years.  Robin Williams does that in The Fisher King--a movie that came along at a sad point in my life and gave me a glimpse of a way to make happy from tragedy.
6. A German wooden box (I believe the flower on the front is an Edelweiss) that belonged to my Grandmother Hartsock.  It's a trick box that opens in a hidden way.  We played with this and other boxes of hers all throughout our childhood.  Hers were also kept in a hutch behind a glass door in the corner of the room.
7. A Rookwood vase that I have loved for as long as I can remember, and Mom sent it home with me this last trip home for Christmas.  They're winnowing their positions a little, but that I have this now makes me feel like I might now be a grown up.
8. In the very back, driftwood from the Indiana Dunes.  I picked those up (and then wouldn't throw them, much to LP's anger and disappointment) during a freezing winter walk Dan and I took along the lake shore when we couldn't take being cooped up one day longer winters ago.

A small corner of the dining room:

 

1. A desk that had belonged to my great uncle Louis.
2. An ice bucket given to us by my aunt and uncle for our wedding.
3. A cocktail shaker I bought secondhand in a small mountain town during grad school.
4. A beautiful wood vase my parents bought for me during our last trip to the Outer Banks.
5. A print by Lisa Congdon of birch trees--a gift from Dan that reminds me of most of the trips we have taken together to Door County Wisconsin and to Maine.

One of my office walls:

 

There's maybe too much to label here, but there's art by friends and by people I have met at art/craft fairs.  The plates are from antique stores, but also Anthropologie. The monster toy in the yellow and green sweater is the first toy I ever made out of yarn.  The toy with the big orange ears is the first toy I ever crocheted and which evolved into the kinds of toys I make now (but really truly seeing that guy in this context again?  maybe I should go back and make some more of those).  The little tiny monkey sitting next to the Indiana University mug (also a gift from elephant-Alex) was a gift from Dan that he brought to me when I got out of out back surgery.  I kept a tight grip on that monkey for the next 24 hours until I was released--his softness was a comfort before I knew if I would be okay.

Belongings aren't just things.  They're memories.  And if they aren't. . . you're doing it wrong.

Chicago, Harinezumi and Memory

I bought a little Harinezumi 2++ camera this past summer. I meant to shoot a film with it for work and didn't. I took a bunch of pictures on vacation--a number of which I posted here--and then the memory card hitched up and I couldn't get the images off the camera. And as those things go, I set it aside and forgot about it.


But this past weekend, I unearthed it, messed around with it, wouldn't take no for an answer and I got the images from the beach off the camera. And rather than dwelling too long on seeing pictures from the sunshine-y North Carolina September seaside on the coldest day of the year in Chicago, I pushed ahead.

And it's all worth it, because here's the thing. I think digital cameras are great for a million different reasons--primarily because you can shoot and shoot and shoot and you will instantly know if any of the images are any good before going through the expense of printing them. But truth be told, I think they're a little soulless. Their images are so crisp, so high-def, so crystal clear. The images they produce are like actually seeing, rather than like remembering. And I think I want photographs for remembering.

When I was a kid, all photography looked like memory--not the crystal clear clarity of the original day as you experienced it, but the way memory faded and played tricks on you and turned a pale hazy blue around the edges. No. Those pictures from the 70's weren't perfect records of the day, but they were kind to your nostalgic view, they didn't jar you with images that were clearer and more immediate and still trapped in that moment of time than your memory could be. . . they aged into the blue and lavendar and green/yellow of your faulty memory. And looking at those images feels right. They feel long ago and that makes me wistful, not sad. There's my dad with a full head of hair and me two feet tall. There's my brother with his big fluffy bowl cut and my mom all slender and grace and smiles. And I don't think, "where did the time go?" I think, "Awwww, look at us back then."

Digital images don't allow for or create that distance. . . except for Harinezumi photos. Digital, but meant to mimic a 110 camera (my childhood camera. anyone? the weird little flat placard at the bottom that you had to push in with your thumb to advance the film foward and the hazy window in the back that would tell you what number picture you were on, if it wasn't fogged up with humidity. And then trying to space the roll out and save shots to stretch the whole vacation because Mom and Dad had only bought you two rolls of film because they could only afford to print two rolls of film. And the oddly shaped pictures at the end, with white edges all around and the light leaks that created dreamy splashes of lavendar or yellow across the center or corner of the photo. anyone?). And so I'm back on board with the little H 2++, because I capture strange, lovely, atmospheric images like this:

This is my city in winter.
This is the city I want to remember in years to come.