It is Time to Unpack the Life you have Amassed
From the desk of the artist Alana Clohessy, in a small corner of Paris, on the Left Bank of the Seine.
Friday, 13th September 2024. 17°C, Mostly Cloudy.
Tea in my cup: Lyons Gold Blend, milk no sugar.
This is my last Lyons Gold Blend teabag from Ireland. I saved it to write this letter to you. Tea is made to be had while chatting with friends. I am using a “tea for one” teapot and cup, to have it in. My Grandmother is ninety and has started giving away her possessions, to the people she loves. This “tea for one” is hers. I drink from it everyday.
When I lived in Vancouver, I used to go to a wonderful thrift store on the North Shore of the city. It is an affluent area of Vancouver and you could get gems for a few dollars. I once got a brass chandelier for 7 dollars that I spray painted yellow. I also got a wooden rocking chair for 9 dollars and a lamp for 5. I decorated my apartment with my finds. I loved it there and tried to visit once a week.
The more I went, the more I took stock of the boxes of things that people once owned. Full boxes of Christmas decorations, with “Ornaments” handwritten on the side by the previous owner. Full dinnerware sets, mingled with other odds and ends on the shelf. Cups and saucers, separated from their matching milk jug. Chipped commemorative plates with their hanging hardware still on the back, having been lifted from a wall. All these things that people owned and loved. Cherished behind glass cabinets, afraid to use them in case of breaking, now lay in a heap on the floor of a Salvation Army. Clothes they once wore lined up on plastic hangers, as people rifled through them. Clothes that looked like new, some with tags, kept for a special occasion.
I have always been a firm believer in using what you own. I spray the expensive perfume everyday to sit at my computer alone. I drink from my cherished, grandmother’s cup. I use what little good china and crystal I own, for really what is the alternative? A life spent gazing at the beauty you own, only for it to become dusty in a box or in the case of perfume, turn sour in the sunlight? Yes, I break things and mourn that I will never be able to replace them.
One that comes to mind is a cup I bought when I lived in Ireland. On the west coast, in Connemara, there was a monastic community of Benedictine nuns who owned and lived in Kylemore Abbey. There the nuns made their own pottery and hand painted the pottery with fuchsia flowers that grew abundantly in the grounds of the abbey and surrounding area. The fuchsia was introduced to Ireland by Victorian gardeners and has always been one of my favourite flowers.
I once viewed a site on the top of a mountain in Ireland, that had a derelict cottage on it. At the time, myself and my boyfriend were going to buy the land and build there, but it didn’t work out. The land was covered in fuchsia flowers and they grew from the old stone walls. I wonder how life would have been different if we had bought that land. Instead we moved to Vancouver together and we now live in Paris. I wouldn’t change the life I have lived but I do wonder what it would have been.
Anyway, on one of my visits to Kylemore Abbey I bought one of the nuns cups. I adored it. Used it all the time. When I was packing to leave for Vancouver, I took it from the cupboard so I could bubble wrap it to bring with me to Canada. It slipped from my hand and smashed on the tiled floor. The nuns had left the convent by then, there were so few of them left. Notre Dame University of Indiana leased the Abbey to use as one of their campuses. The pottery was no longer made. I looked at the pieces on the ground and mourned the loss but realised it represented my cottage on the hill. I was holding onto something that no longer was. Life moves on and we must keep up with it. So I swept the pieces into a dustpan and put them into the bottom of one of my flower pots for drainage. Things may be broken but it doesn’t mean they have no use.
(Having written this I decided to look up Kylemore Abbey as it has been over 12 years since I last visited. Turns out they now sell the Fuschia pottery online and ship worldwide. It is no longer made by the Benedictine nuns but by the Benedictine community. Is anything ever really lost?)
We hold onto things, things we attach meaning to. Cups and saucers can represent something more, to an individual user. A set of crystal can signify a level of wealth you never thought you could achieve. A vintage car polished on the drive and never started, a possession once unattainable and afraid to scratch. A set of dinnerware your mother once owned, all you have left of her, other than your memory. With things we cherish most, comes the fear of loss. This fear can be overpowering, so much so, that we allow it to overwhelm and diminish the joy of the things we love. We continue to keep our precious things in a box.
Another reason, is we feel we don’t deserve it. There must be a reason to use the “good stuff”, to wear the expensive dress. The everydays are what make up the good stuff. We forget it is all the sunrises that make up the years, and each sunset a close of day. That in itself is worth celebrating. The light always returns and this day too, shall end. The only one left will always be you.
I was on a stopover in Seattle airport a few years ago and bought some Patience Brewster Christmas decorations. I hand carried them back to Vancouver and hand carried them when I came to France. Seeing all those boxes in the thrift shop, I know someday they will be worth nothing to anyone, so I put them on my garland every Christmas, even though their necks are beginning to crack. They are delicate and finite.
How many things were hand carried throughout a life and we have no memory of it? Stop hoarding your happiness for a day that might never come. It’s time to wear your good clothes to buy bread and milk, light your Diptyque candle and don’t worry about smashing your crystal glasses on the tap as you clean up after a party. Nothing lasts in perpetuity and the objects that last beyond us, end up discarded on the floor of a thrift shop, having never been used. Life does not belong behind glass. Really, what day are you waiting for?
In the words of my Grandfather, “there are no pockets in a shroud”.
It is time to unpack the life you have amassed.
I will leave you with a poem I wrote a few years ago when I lived in Vancouver about my thrift shop. I was part of a writers group and was asked to perform my poetry throughout the city. This was one of them.
Thrift Shop End Thrift shops differ in every city I have visited. They even change as you move throughout neighbourhoods. Affluent areas are always the best and the most forlorn. Old men and women having lived their long lives in an area, only for it to shift as the sands in their egg timer run out. Collections of hand signed plates now lay discarded and jumbled upon a shelf. A bedside lamp that illuminated their firstborn's midnight breath, their heart medication’s last dose, sits dusty, with a $7 price tag stuck to the material lampshade. The Christmas decorations that were carefully wrapped in tissue and stored each year, labelled with red FRAGILE stickers, have been rifled through and split up. Sneered upon by modern sensibilities. How you smiled when the last one was placed upon the tree. Your son, when seven, asked could he have your decorations when he got older. You wrote his name upon the box. He didn’t notice as his wife dropped it off at the thrift store. A child thrifting with her mother mouths the word “Conor” scrawled across the box in your cursive hand, beneath a worn fragile. Your jewellery box that was kept beside your bed. Your wedding rings long since removed. Not all was relegated to the thrift store. Just your legacy and the items you touched the most. Your cup and saucer from which you drunk your tea. The teapot and the forget-me-not patterned jug. The Dresden dinner set you received from your mother when you were married. Bits and pieces sit in other peoples homes. Some upon the internet. Does your soul travel with your stuff? Egyptians sent their loved ones into the Underworld with a tribe of servants and slaves. Our objects define our waking lives. Thrift stores define our demise. Alána Clohessy
Au revoir - until we meet again,
Alana x