The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

My old man is turning 98 this month and we’re moving him from his house to an independent living apartment. Okay, I know, not much of a birthday present but here I am, back in Wisconsin to help my brother haul furniture and pack dishes, sell a car and sort through a lifetime of accumulation. We had hoped to call a thrift store and have them pick up what wouldn’t fit in his new apartment but Covid killed that plan.

Plan B is to box a few decades and deliver who knows how many years to Goodwill or St. Vinnie’s. Assuming they’ll even take donations during these plague times. If not, we’ll haul it to the nearest landfill.

If you’ve never sorted through the lives of your parents, you maybe can’t imagine the endless possibilities of nostalgia, sorrows, regrets and memories laying in wait among the claptrap and the photographs, the letters and the bad art. None of us three boys want much of anything the folks accrued over nearly a century. Which says more about what children of the Great Depression spent money on than it does the difference in theirs and their kids’ tastes.

Our folks weren’t collectors of art or antiques or even their own parents’ stuff. They bought cheap or not at all, making it easy to discard at this juncture. But … the family photographs, old albums of aunts and uncles, great grandparents and family vacations, who takes those? Our little brother, the only one of us with kids, doesn’t want them. I’ll take a few but when I bite the big bullet, they’ll go to the burn pile and another family history ends up the way most do, letters lost, names forgotten, memories fading like the photo chemicals in the albums, sad but true for most of us. This trip will be a lesson in accepting that we’re not famous people, we better just live our lives and be thankful for that.

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