things with meaning

I come from folk who save things. This could be called hoarding, but perhaps, for us, it is more about keeping connections alive. My grandmother, mother and I all experienced sudden loss of a parent/husband, coupled with the loss of our home environment in which that loved person once existed.

In Ganna's case, she and her two sisters lost their father when they were teenagers. In my case I was seven. Our respective mothers then had to reconstitute their lives without their husbands and with dependent young people. In Ganna's case, she and her sisters came from Ireland to St Leonards on Sea, leaving their old lives behind ands starting again. In my case, Mum and I had to up sticks and move to Hastings from our happy life in Petersfield. She went back to full time work and life went on, because that was what one did in the sixties, no grief counselling or even a sense that it was needed. I cannot imagine how hard that was for her. As life has continued, even those two loved women have become lost to me.

I wonder whether these losses have meant that remnants of that old life take on an almost talismanic power; keepers of the past. As long as these curtains, our dining table, that chair are here, then the past, which includes that lost loved one, isn't entirely gone. The article has known their touch.

There is a laundry basket: wicker, worn, much used. It may well be 90 years old, bought when Ganna was first married in the 1920s. In recent years the wicker ties holding the lid on have  creaked a greeting to me each time I pop another piece of laundry in. I have known it for most of my life. Recently, the final tie holding lid and basket together died. The lid became a separate entity.

I sensibly, if a little wistfully, ordered a replacement. The replacement arrived, but the old basket remained in the way, for weeks. I couldn't face ditching it! Then a thought occurred. I store upright things in my craft room, cardboard rolls, baking parchment, rolls of needlepoint canvas and the like. The basket is the perfect height to hold them.

So now a muddled corner has more clarity, the bigger muddle surrounding it has been rationalised. But most importantly, I sill have that battered, venerable old basket, which existed in different bedrooms through loss and moves, still with the touch of Ganna's and Mum's hands captured in its weave.

I expect I should have just broken it up and burned it, or taken it to the tip.

I'm glad I didn't ...