I dreamt about the immensity of the task: the rambling house; the thousand books; the clothes-stuffed wardrobes in every room; the groaning originally temporary but now permanent spillover shelves warped with the weight of accumulation.
Much of the gathered freight had been magpied from charity shops by the obsessive collector - who wasn't really obsessed, but merely gained great satisfaction, having been a child of the 1930s Depression and therefore had economy flowing through her ancient veins, in paying next to nothing for old treasures. And yes, old junk. Anything that had a potential practical use was never to be thrown out. This habit, not rare among early-twentieth centurians, predated an entire twenty-first-century obsession with recycling, a thoroughly corrupted incarnation of that elementary, transparent six-letter word: thrift. But her thriftiness was not the hair-shirted asceticism associated with today’s displays of self-denial; indeed there was an element of brio in all this: witness the jar by the door. It’s not really a jar; it's a large glass mixing bowl (Pyrex, circa 1970, period orange floral design) - but that description would never have fitted into Eleanor Rigby - so let's also call it a jar by the door. It contains earrings, gleaned in their dangly hundreds from places unknown over decades, and it sits on the kitchen bench near the light switch, so that the second-to-last thing she would do before setting off on a shopping trip or a walk up the street or a bus ride to Moonee Ponds would be to select a pair of outrageous earrings. Of course, they got mixed up and she once - actually fairly recently - a week or two before she died - wore a novelty Christmas plum-pudding earring in one ear and a large traffic light in the other. Age 96. When it was remarked upon she affected eccentricity rather than ignorance in a millisecond. ‘Of course I knew,’ she scoffed. ‘And why do they need to match anyway?’
Why indeed. My daughter, her grand-daughter, spent a whole evening last year tipping out the jar, sorting the earrings, and hanging them in pairs on one of those decorative wire earring display things; but my mother would just throw them back in the jar after taking them off each night. The jar of randomness. Like human life. And death.
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Wearing the face that she keeps in a jar by the door/Who is it for?
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