The red chair was my grandfather’s. He was an officer in the military who spent his life moving—with my grandmother and their daughter, Betty, my mother—from one post to another, sometimes two or three times a year.
I knew him in old age as a slender, white-haired man who took us to feed the ducks and grew beds full of roses. He’d lost an eye in World War I, but it didn’t diminish his view of the world as one big adventure after another. And I don’t think the positioning of the red chair in his living room—our living room, after we moved in with him when my grandmother died—was any accident.
The chair sat against a jog in the wall, looking out through the bay window, overseeing the street. He could also see straight to the front door, while over his shoulder he had a view of the patio door. Being a military man, he (surely subconsciously) chose the one spot in the room where he had an almost 360-degree view of his surroundings.
Since my grandfather’s death, no one has really sat in the chair. So when my sister and I finally came to terms with the thousands of dollars we’d spent storing furniture for 10 years after our mother died, we had to ask ourselves: With two households of our own already, why were we hanging on to all this stuff?
As I thought about it, I realized that part of what keeps us holding on to cherished items—and even the not-so-cherished—is that we can’t bear to think of throwing away any link we may still have to our families. Did we listen to our loved ones’ stories? Not nearly enough. We realize this only after they’re gone. And so begins our journey into the maze of family belongings, when we soon discover that their stories live on in the things they left us. Ours for the keeping.
— Lisa Tracy GSC’90
Lisa Tracy is the author of Objects of Our Affection: Uncovering My Family One Chair, Pistol, and Pickle Fork at a Time (Random House/Bantam, 2010), an upbeat and intriguing tribute to the pack rat in all of us.