We Might Need That Someday

Granny took the lead. “Let’s pull everything out and lay it on the ground. We’ll see what’s still good, who wants what, and the rest can either be burned or hauled to the dump.”

As I stepped up onto the drop-down doorstep, I peered through the door. It was creepy, piled high with crap. Cobwebs stretched from one corner of the big window over the couch to the other. The drapes were tattered and torn. The wood paneling was peeling away from the ceiling in long strips. Boxes had long engulfed the small path from the living room to the bedroom. On top of the heap was a stack of a half-dozen or so bushel baskets.

Sitting on the couch was a long, slender box. Worn and held together with brown-paper tape, a silver pompom was sticking out the end of its paper sleeve. Next to it was a box with a color wheel printed on the side.

Leaning against one wall was a rather large velvet painting of Jesus.

An old canister vacuum cleaner.

A green electric orange juicer with a fabric cord.

A reed-woven rocking chair with a broken rocker.

A gallon glass jar with Grandma’s bathing suit in it.

On the kitchen countertop sat a large Prince Albert can overflowing with nuts and bolts, its top cocked sideways atop the heap. Assorted condiment jars held nails, screws and odds and ends.

Several old electric cords that had been cut off lamps and appliances were neatly coiled and hung on a nail by the door.

Around the outside, it was the same. A stack of lumber of varying lengths. A few pieces of rusted old tin leaned against the side of the trailer. An old ladder slid underneath the axle. A stack of old flowerpots.

Once my initial curiosity and desire to plunder had been satisfied, I began helping by moving things from the lawn to the trash pile. Someone had gathered all the jars and cans of nails, screws, nuts and bolts together in an old wooden crate. I heaved it onto the trash pile.

“Dennis, what are you doing?” Uncle Glenn asked.

“Granny said this is the trash pile.”

“No, that’s not trash,” he responded.

“It looks like junk to me. The nails are even crooked. Why don’t we throw it away?” I asked.

Without hesitation, he responded, “Because we might need that someday.”

Grandma Murphy, sitting in a chair that had been moved out onto the lawn, asked anyone within earshot, “Good God Almighty. Have you ever seen so much junk in your life?”

“There’s more shit here than Carter’s got liver pills,” Granny replied.

Grandma moved toward the edge of the chair. Her hands were positioned one on top of the other, resting on the crook of her cane. She tapped it up and down, smashing bull ants, rocking slightly forward.

“Well, if I can get my bearings, I’m going to head back up to the house and finish lunch. You all will be hungry soon, won’t you? I’ve made a potato salad and have a Sour Cream Pound Cake in the oven. All I’ve got to do is put together the Cuban sandwiches. I’ll put the meat and cheese on them, then you all can dress them how you like them.”

As I opened the screen door, the warm, sweet, lemony smell of pound cake reminded me that I was unmistakably at Grandma’s house.

“Grandma, that cake sure smells good,” Mama said, with a girlish smile that stretched from ear to ear.

“I haven’t made one in a month of Sundays. I hope it turned out. I suspect it will be eaten regardless.”

The table was set, covered with an orange-patterned oilcloth. A big crock bowl of potato salad sat at one end of the table. Mrs. Cassie’s platter was piled high with Cuban sandwiches at the other. An old mayonnaise jar was full of homemade bread-and-butter pickles. A jar of mayonnaise, a jar of mustard, salt and pepper, a saucer of sliced tomatoes and lettuce leaves, and a pitcher of iced tea completed the table. Everything was covered with crinkled aluminum foil from a stash that Grandma kept clean and neatly folded in her buffet — “to keep the nasty flies away.”

“Do you think you’ll finish today?” Grandma asked.

“Yes, I think we will — or close to it. There’s 60 years of accumulation out there. If we don’t finish today, we’ll come back next weekend,” Uncle Glenn responded.

Still thinking most of it belonged on the trash pile, I said we could finish today if we didn’t have to go through everything one thing at a time.

“Dennis, there are a lot of memories out there and good, useful stuff too. Grandma Hartley’s typewriter, her looking glass, the old silver Christmas tree. All that wood and tin,” Mama answered.

She continued, “Glenn, I bet that old wood and tin are what’s left of the scraps that Daddy used to make the topper for his truck. Do you remember that?”

“I do,” he said with a smile on his face, adding, “I’d never seen anything like it. He built it so he could sell fish out of the back of his truck. I had to straighten the old nails he’d pulled out of some house that was being torn down. I’m sure that’s where the wood and tin came from too.”

Mama, not being able to shake the memory, continued. “I was so embarrassed when we’d go off in that truck. It felt like we were the Clampetts. I still say what he built was the first truck topper.”

“Daddy was resourceful,” Uncle Glenn said.

“I’d say,” Mama answered. “One day I went looking for my roller skates. I looked everywhere and couldn’t find them. Daddy kept saying, ‘Gaynell, they’re in the hall, they’re in the hall.’ He had screwed them to the bottom of the built-in laundry hamper so it would roll smoothly for Mama.”

Everyone at the table grinned at the memory.

Granny looked across the table at Mama and Uncle Glenn. “Do you remember those pie tins your daddy put around the light bulbs?”

“Yes!” they answered almost in unison.

Grandma, slicing a piece of pound cake, chimed in. “Well, in my day we made do with what we had. Just because something was used didn’t mean it wasn’t still good. I’ve always saved my mayonnaise jars for put up my tomatoes and pickles. Oleo bowls made good storage for leftovers or for freezing creamed corn. You younger ones wouldn’t remember, but during the war, aluminum was in short supply. You didn’t just use it once and throw it away. You cleaned it off and saved it for next time. We made do or did without. These young’uns today,” shaking her head in mild disgust — “throw out and buy new.”

With full bellies, Uncle Glenn stretched his arms above his head, slowly standing up. “Well, I guess we should get back at it.”

“I’ll clear the table so that you all can get busy,” Grandma said.

The afternoon was spent sorting. Some things went to Granny’s house. Others to Uncle Glenn’s. Mama had a pile too. I didn’t quite get the importance of keeping all that junk — even though a few things were really neat. Today, I understand. I have my own pile. Some of it is the same stuff that Granny, Mama, and Uncle Glenn took that day.

For me, the last twenty years have been spent living in Costa Rica. The old trailers are long gone. Grandma’s new house is now more than 40 years old. A big storage building now sits almost exactly where the old green trailer once sat. But through all the change, no matter how far I’ve wandered, I always come back to the old homeplace.

On a recent trip, my flight from Costa Rica was delayed and diverted to Fort Lauderdale due to a surprise afternoon thunderstorm. I finally walked through the front door of the little house at 3 a.m. the next morning. It’s the same place we always referred to as the Allen house, or simply the little house, after the Allen family, who had lived there for more than 35 years.

Tired and hungry, I settled in, taking in my surroundings, looking for something to eat.

A can of Campbell’s Tomato Soup and soda crackers would have to suffice. I grabbed a spoon out of the drawer of the old green hutch and saw the glimmer of a stack of neatly folded but wrinkled tin foil, waiting for its next use.

As I looked around the kitchen, the conversation reappeared. I saw the old crock bowl that held Grandma’s potato salad that day forty-some years prior. Next to it were a few mayonnaise jars of tomatoes. The orange juicer was there too, its frayed fabric cord coiled around it. Grandma’s old Nabisco Premium Saltine Cracker tin, where she kept her tea bags, sits on the shelf, holding my tea bags now.

As I made my way into my bedroom, I laid my wallet and keys on top of the old pedal sewing machine, next to Grandma Hartley’s typewriter.

The next morning, I wandered over to Uncle Glenn’s and opened the door to the big storage building, ready to plunder, looking for something that I needed, something that I knew I had saved. Looking at the mountain of junk before me, it dawned on me that more than half of what was inside was mine — my own junk that I’d collected or inherited over the course of my 52 years.

Jars of nuts, bolts, screws and nails.

A stack of old lumber.

Boxes of Mama’s china.

Bolts of fabric.

Piles of furniture waiting to be reupholstered.

Standing there in almost the same spot, I was back in the field at that little green trailer again. The table. Discovering what happened to Mama’s skates. Granddaddy’s homemade topper. And Grandma: “Just because something was used didn’t mean it wasn’t still good.”

Then it hit me, like the ton of old street bricks stacked up outside the garage that had been salvaged in 1930 when Highway 301 was paved: not only did I inherit the stuff. I inherited the habit — of saving, of reusing, and just holding on.

Hot and in need of a glass of iced tea, I walked back to the little house. As I grabbed the car keys off the sewing machine, I looked up and saw Grandma’s bathing suit, still in the glass jar, its rusted lid and wooden bail handle sitting on a shelf in my bedroom. Why was Grandma’s bathing suit in a glass jar in the first place, I asked myself? It beats the hell out of me.

Who knows, we might need that someday!