Old Furniture, New Thoughts, As Usual
I now have this loveseat in my bedroom that belonged to my Great-Aunt Frances. She died at the end of September, a month and half or so shy of her hundred and first birthday. She was a character, which seems to be what makes up the entirety of my family – voted a “Beauty” at Mississippi State College for Women, was the first female sales executive at Delta Airlines, which allowed her to travel all over the world and made her the “cool aunt” to my mother’s generation of six Lutz kids and dozens of cousins. She was one of ten children, after all. She was a devout Catholic, evidenced when Father Juan held up her tattered, heavily underlined bible above her coffin repeatedly at the funeral. Nobody seems to understand what I mean when I say my family is “Really Catholic”, but trust me, we are indeed “Really Catholic.”
In the year and a half that I’ve been back home, I’ve gotten closer to my family, closer than I intended to, to be perfectly honest. I spend more time with my parents, texting them most every day, often in a panic: “How do you get rid of gnats? What’s your favorite stain remover? Can I come over for dinner tn? I’m broke.” They’re in my home a lot, helping me to move things and bringing found furniture and hanging paintings they helped me to frame. I can see how time has passed for them in what their conversation sounds like nowadays, but also in how they’ve grown more relaxed around each other. They cook together more and do more projects around the house. They seem like they like each other more. I like them more too, though they still try my patience.
Before I went to college, and during college as well, I had this fear that, when my parents’ aged, I was the one that the responsibility of caring for them would fall to. I read far too many literary novels of family decay at nineteen, I guess. Now, at twenty-six, it seems that I am caring for them. Just not in the way I expected.
I let my mother buy me shoes and scour resale pages for furniture for my house. I let my father toy with my resume and send me old Arlo Guthrie performances on YouTube. I come to see them every other week or so. In this way, I care for them.
In the time that I’ve been home as well, I’ve thought about my extended family and our history. Who we are, where we come from, the roots that spread up and back through time. The furniture in my apartment is collected not only from antique stores and junk shops, but from castoffs from my family, cobbled together into the makeup of my home. I see my extended family more often, or hear about what they’re up to from my parents. I want to put it in more of an effort to see them too. The way our family spiderwebs out from a common relative, how many of us there are, how we’ve remained more or less close or in contact, all this on both sides, fascinates me.
These are some of the many things that I’ve been considering lately. The loveseat. The funeral. Family history. Age. Time. The space you take up and the home that you make, and how it connects and is imprinted on by all of these things.
Let me tell you what I mean.
I have always tended to date older, whether that’s in the short term or the long term. At twenty-six, it’s mostly men in any year of their thirties. For the first time in my life, marriage comes up as something people are spending serious time thinking about. It’s different, in my opinion, than dating in your younger years and just hoping to find someone you like and seeing what happens (which is where I’m at, to be clear). It’s different even than dating someone for a long time, and then knowing or seriously considering when it is you take this next step. It feels to me like an era of, “I’m ready now. I know for sure this is what I want now. I don’t know who with, but I want a life partner. Perhaps I want a family.”
Who can imagine that level of certainty? And without even knowing who fills that role?
My Great-Aunt Frances never married. “Independent” was the word used most often to describe her. No one in our family seemed to find it strange. Many of us on my mother’s side actually, men and women, have never married, and no one has ever batted an eye. Marriage is never something I’ve felt pressured into by my family. I’ve never known why we’re so relaxed about it.
I wonder when in your life you make that decision, when you reach that moment of deciding one way or another. I wonder if most people even think of it as something to make a decision about, or if it’s something you just fall into. That can be good or bad I suppose.
On our ride up to Oxford a week or so ago, my friend Molly asked me if it was important to me, in terms of my future, to stay in close proximity to my family. I think of my friend Meredith, who will not consider moving more than three or so hours away from her mother. I think of each of my cousins on my mother’s side, and the moment they brought their partner to Lutz family Thanksgiving or Christmas, warning “Now, let me tell you, I have a large family,” and how this never prevented a single one of them from going wide-eyed with how many of us there were. I think of how I have fantasized about that moment, or tried to force it to happen, because I am obsessed with someone viewing me in an environment that has made me, and hearing their thoughts on what they “think it means”, them saying, “I can see this part of you there, this part of you here.” I think of my family papers and letters in the archives at The W, how I have read pieces but barely dug past the surface, and how I would like to. I think about how much time I have lost, and how I am starting too late in terms of asking questions, in trying to excavate the past. I think of my cousins and the nine children between them, running around the cemetery in Canton, wondering if an affinity for cemeteries is inherited on both sides of my family, my father’s and my mother’s. I think of the possibility of my parents’ moving into my home, or me into theirs, to care for them in their old age. What would that look like? What would that be like?
“I don’t know,” I said. “To be honest, I really don’t know.”