[Creative Nonfiction | Issue 10]

bryn grybben

st pamela of the coats

My mother picks up a blue glass bottle with a silver British lion dancing on its cork, a royal pirouette. “Where did you get this?” she asks, tracing his tiny mane with her long fingers. “The antique mall, of course.” I put another dish in the dishwasher. “Oh, honey,” she sighs. “Save your money. This is why you’ll never buy a house.”

My mother loves my stuff, so it’s hard for her to condemn my beautiful things. She appreciates my ability to find good deals, living, as she does, where most estate sales consist of ancient farm equipment. She loves the painting of lilacs purchased for $20, the mirror given to me by two customers who found out I was engaged. She wanders my home each time she visits, how long have you had this?  like a record on repeat. Like an old song loved because it is familiar, I sing it with her, even when the record skips and judgment comes.

“Why can’t I make myself BUY?” she asks me, picking up a rosary box I got at a flea market. “I have the money, and I just can’t do it. When you see something you love, you just get it.” I hug her, wish I could give her everything she wants to find without spending a dime.

My mother grew up poor. No Christmas present was cherished, if there was even a present. All her birthday stories are sad. Once she asked for a bird, and her father gave her a fake one in a cage and laughed. Still, her beauty was her own. She won “Best Dressed” on her floor in her college dorm, when she only had two dresses, alternating carefully which one she wore to class. She had one coat.

“Everything you have is so unique—it shouldn’t go together, but it’s all just so YOU,” Mom says. She’s looking at a wall on which hangs a giant painting of white cranes on an orange background. Underneath it, an expanse of blue and white vases sit, their varied shapes like minarets within an city.

This is why I love stuff: the ways it both does and does not reflect you until you bring it into your home. Then, it forges a new relationship, almost alchemically, with your other things. Many of the antiques dealers with whom I’ve worked think so too. But there’s a clear class divide, I’m finding: the ones who grew up wealthy want to show others what they love, want others to value what they love and replicate it. They stock their booths with what they like and expect others to like it; few are ok if they don’t. The ones who grew up poor are surprised by beauty, want to share it with you, know it’s never theirs to keep. The happiest dealers, rich or poor, are the ones who know the magic cannot be predicted—that what draws someone to something is as mystical as why we fall in love with one person instead of another. We almost never go for the one who’ll keep us safe, choosing, instead, the one who makes us feel alive.

My mother is a martyr of her own making, aware but unable to let herself have what she needs, oscillating between a sense of material investment, security, and a Zen-like desire for detachment. When the man she loved moved home after college and married his high school sweetheart, she married a man she did not love for fear of being alone. When she divorced my father, she took almost nothing when she left, hoping integrity would be enough. Yet still she dreams about our old house. My sister and I hide from her the things the next wife has still, the blue and white banquet platters, the china cabinets of dark wood. It annoys my sister when Mom wonders aloud what happened to her goldenrod leather chairs. Why didn’t you take them, then? I stay silent. I know she thought she could be free of things if she had love. But love is not the same thing as freedom.

Once, I texted pictures of all my windowsills to a new lover: tiny animal figures dancing amidst broken crystals, Italian marbles resting next to vintage postcards of Seattle, of Nice, the wooden sculpture of a crow with a golden ring in its mouth perched beside a stone woman’s head covered in live succulents. I feel like I really know you now, he’d written back. It takes so little to connect, if everything you bring near you expresses what you love, how you want to be loved.

 My mother owns closets full of coats now, will never be cold again, coats of leather, wool, fur, a camel hair coat to her knees, even the first coat she owned in college: green with a silver fox collar. They’re part of what passed for love from her next partner, who told her attachment to family was the grossest need of all, made it difficult for her to have visitors, required her to horde in the basement all the items his OCD mind deemed “contaminated.” But He was always generous, she says, knowing he, too, had grown up poor. Her car trunk is a revolving department store, full of purchases, full of returns. She cannot let herself keep something just because she loves it. Not even us—although I mean this in the most positive sense.  For she is that rare mother, the kind who loves you and allows you to become fully yourself, to be independent, even if it means moving far away, as I have done. Then again, children are not possessions.

My sister and I grew up in the house of which she still dreams. I have seen much bigger, nicer homes; and I have lived in homes much, much smaller, less nice, renting what I can in a city no one can afford. My sister is in our hometown, owns the only house big enough for all of us at holidays, a fairytale house amidst ranch-style houses of peeling siding. We both make spaces of wonder, but Mom doesn’t approve of either of our methods. My sister spends hundreds and throws everything away often. I spend $5 or $50 dollars on tiny things, keep everything. You feel our decisions everywhere in our homes, the care in the coziness, how we want others’ comfort to be a part of our own.

I want my mother to love her things without identifying herself with their worth. I want her to find pleasure in what they reflect to her about joy, not the rise or fall of quality in her life. I want her to walk into her house and receive the love and care she gives me, gives us, for herself. I think of all the time she and I spent rubbing teak oil into the wooden posts of our front porch, that home she cared for so long ago and then left, hoping she’d find herself beyond its step. I would give her anything, but she’s not good at receiving gifts. And that’s what I most wish for her: that she could give herself the gift of loving herself enough not to doubt herself. Maybe I can’t stop filling my home with beautiful things because I hope she’ll see what I see in her within them. Or maybe she does, but no vision is complete without seeing loss, too.

“I guess I need to spend my money or you girls will spend it for me,” Mom says. “Please don’t get me anything for Christmas.”

But this Christmas, from me, she will find a small china plate with these words: Buy what thou hast no need of, and ere long thou wilt sell thy necessities. At a great pennyworth pause awhile. Many are ruined by buying bargains.

Dearest mother of mine, I know I spent my pennies on this, but I have need of you, my necessity.

__________

About the author

Bryn Gribben is a poet and essayist who left academia to explore antiques.  Her essay "Cabin" was nominated for a 2019 Pushcart Prize, and she was a finalist both for the 2021 Creative Nonfiction Porch Prize and the Peseroff Prize in poetry.  Bryn's first book, a musical memoir, Amplified Heart:  An Emotional Discography, was published by Otherwords Press in 2022. She lives in Seattle with two cats and a love song of a husband. Find more at bryngribben.org