Devil in a Blue Dress
on stuff and memories and women with Big Glasses. Plus, Emily Nunn's melon salad.
Amazon Prime Day was this week, the Nordstrom annual sale is coming up, and every retailer is getting in on the action with sales of their own. If you are a digital person who has left some cookies lying around, it’s nearly impossible to avoid an onslaught of tantalizing ads, though Becoming Minimalist offered 10 Things You Can Do This Week Instead of Online Shopping. I appreciate their suggestion to bake muffins.
I returned from Portugal with a plan and that plan includes cleaning out the house I’ve lived in for 27 years so we can eventually sell it. Everyone has told me this takes longer than you’d expect. It’s forced me to begin confronting my relationship to stuff — the stuff I have and the dopamine-inducing stuff I want. It’s also forced me to reconcile what I need for the life I currently have versus what I’ll need for the next chapter, and as a subset, the reality that things I accumulate now will be things I’ll have to deal with later.
The real challenge is that it’s making me think about the difference between need and want. And about the role stuff plays in preserving memories and weaving dreams.
To set the mood for all this grappling, here’s some concert footage that brings back fond memories for me, an original Jersey girl.
I’ve loosely divided my stuff into three categories: Useful, Memorable, and Personal.
The first is the easiest to deal with. We don’t have much Useful stuff worth hanging onto and certainly nothing worth shipping anywhere.
Except for maybe my big blue Le Creuset Dutch oven. How heavy is too heavy?
Photographs and Memories
Memorabilia gets trickier, especially if you have an attic, where it can conveniently remain out of sight, out of mind, except when you venture up to look for something and fall down a nostalgic rabbit hole.
In recent years, as Baby Boomers age, there has been a spate of articles about the sea change in handing down heirlooms, which younger generations have neither the lifestyle nor interest to accommodate. My grandparents’ house was a treasure trove of junk, though maybe they were hoarders.
What else would explain my grandmother’s decision to keep her formaldehyde-preserved uterus after a hysterectomy?
My branch of the family was less sentimental. My mother sold all of her stuff at an auction, in preparation for an overseas move that never happened. It feels poignant to be following in her footsteps at this stage of my life, but not have her around to talk to about it. When she died, I only inherited a few classic cookbooks with her personalized bookplates, a red suitcase, and her address book and travel journal, with her distinctive penmanship and names of the people she met on the road.
It’s been more than ten years, but I haven’t been able to part with any of it. Almost no one but me remembers that my mother used to sign her name with a little drawing, that she loved to go to international food festivals, and that she made friends everywhere she went. I don’t want to forget.
Recently my older daughter, our family’s memory-keeper, surprised me by saying that she feels a connection to my grandmother’s white, gold-rimmed china set, which I don’t remember from my childhood and which we only use on holidays — one of several traditions I manufactured for my family.
I don’t care about those plates, but I do care about our boxes of Christmas tree ornaments. More than report cards, stories, pictures, stuffed animals, books, and participation certificates, all of which I’ve slowly been purging from the attic, our ornaments reflect family milestones, ranging from whatever our kids were obsessed with in a given year (Care Bears, ballerinas, cheeseburgers, Drake) to momentous events, like hitting the garbage cans in our driveway while learning to drive. (J is a very creative ornament-maker).
We’re just beginning to experience the separation that happens when your kids become adults. Do those ornaments come to Portugal? Do we keep adding to the collection, even when we no longer spend the holiday together?
I’ve got boxes of faded pictures from the years I spent traveling around Europe and Asia, experiences that changed my life. It was fun to look at them with the family last Christmas, but I doubt anyone but me cares about them enough to want to hang onto them, even in digital form.
The bottom line is that we will not have a home that serves as the family anchor.
When we get rid of our stuff, all of our memories will become intangible, though I hope they remain indelible.
Souvenirs and aspirations
What’s left then is my personal stuff. Though some of it is relevant to my life right now, a surprising amount of it is either a relic of the past or a hope for the future.
I recently came to the realization that many of my things served as a substitute for a life I was no longer living, when I made the shift from world-traveling diplomat to minivan-driving, stay-at-home mom. During the years when I felt squelched by domesticity and desperately missed traveling, I needed tangible evidence of who I was and where I had been. The tattered remnants of my Foreign Service life decorated our house and the pantry was filled with cookbooks enabling culinary travel. With a new adventure on the horizon, have my Indian rice-sorter-turned table, Thai klong jar, and Vietnamese silk paintings served their purpose?
We’ll get to the cookbooks later.
Which brings me to the Blue Dress.
There’s never been a better time to be a Woman of a Certain Age, especially if you receive carefully targeted ads on Instagram. My social media feeds seems to be full of attractive older white women, sometimes famous actresses, sometimes influencers I’ve never heard of (who is Mel Robbins?) wearing oversized black glasses, to signify that they are Serious. They lean in and conspiratorially share their secrets to living your best life. Usually this involves buying an expensive product or developing a daily gratitude practice.
My aspirations for my Third Act come alive every time I see an ad featuring a carefree woman in a Blue Dress with an intricate paisley or geometric print, though I already own several of them. Bonus points if the material is soft and flowing.
To me, these dresses are like Superhero capes, enabling a life that is interesting and unconstrained.
But first, I have some serious purging to do.
The Best Thing I Cooked This Week
This week I emerged from a long bout of COVID and was able to host a party for my Seattle pickleball friends. I posted some of the pictures on Facebook, and my friend C, who lives in Texas, commented, “I remember attending a party in that backyard.”
One of the joys of aging is the trove of memories we accumulate and the people we share them with.
You should check out
on Substack. She’s a salty, no bullshit Woman of a Certain Age who knows her way around salads. She might wear those Big Glasses, but I won’t hold it against her.For the party, I made her delicious Shaved Melon Salad with Lime Honey Vinaigrette. I didn’t actually shave the melon or the parmesan cheese and you know what, it didn’t matter.
Make this salad while juicy melons are in season. You won’t regret it.
Have you watched that Marie Kondo program about clearing stuff out? Who knew watching people sort through their stuff could make for such captivating television!
I gave away some things during the pandemic. My neighborhood Buy Nothing page helped me a lot. People would be particularly excited about a certain item. It was a nicer process to give it to them rather than just donate. I am reading David Copperfield as a follow up to Demon Copperhead. Since it was originally serialized, it made sense to go ahead and read another book ‘in between’ and I am back to DC now.