Lately, I’ve been wondering: what is an estate?
My friend Hilary answered with something from a book she read: “it’s the museum of your life”.
Sometimes I describe my apartment as a museum of unfinished plans. I came to this realization after a few long stints away from it. A couple times in the last few years, Emily and I have packed up and spent a month in Utah (where my family lives).
I’m always a bit unsettled by how easy it is to live out of a suitcase. When we get back from these trips, everything in the apartment feels a bit … extra. Maybe all I need is a couple outfits, and the rest is just baggage. Maybe I could have plenty of fun in an empty apartment if I weren’t so distracted by stuff.
I’ve been in the spirit of downsizing lately. I sold my motorcycle, and I sold my little farmhouse in Orem, Utah. I’m not exactly sure what’s driving me toward these big changes. Maybe it was the birth of my daughter Lydia, back in June.
But the downsizing hasn’t stopped with the big ticket items. I donated a few boxes of books this summer. I cut the spines off my handwritten journals, scanned each page using my Epson FastFoto, then put them in the recycling.
Then I scanned the scrapbook my Great Grandma Lucich made about her son Grant after he died. I haven’t recycled it yet, but the scrapbook is permanently disassembled. It was the last of his stuff. He died in the early 80s, but now it feels like his estate is really gone.
Last year, during one of our month-long visits to Utah, I asked Trevor to come take photos of my grandparents in their house.
During the photo session, as she is prone to do, my grandma gave Trevor a tour of the bottle caps from her dad’s dairy farm, the cow bells and farm tools, hundreds of hung photos of ancestors and children and grandchildren, and a framed invitation to JFK’s inaugural speech from her time working for a senator.
Now I hang a photo of them in their house in my house.
I have a lifetime of fond memories in their house: visiting from Florida and experiencing snow for the first time, living there in elementary school while my dad was between jobs, and two years I spent in their basement while I went to college.
Sometimes I fantasize about living there again. I imagine myself preserving the museum of their lives—tending the garden, dusting the photo frames, and showing JFK to the visitors. It seems all too easy to give up on my little estate in place of my grandparents’ estate of stories, because most of the things in my house aren’t family heirlooms. In fact, most of the things in my house come pre-owned from families I’ve never met.
If I gave a tour of my house (to Trevor), I would give a tour of estate-sale purchases.
The lamp in my office which I bought on the first day of an estate sale—but got at half off because I let them use it for lighting through the rest of the weekend. It sits above a cushion where I’ve set up a little reading nook for Lydia.
Or the garlic press we bought at a fancy house in Piedmont because it looked like a Star Trek prop, even though we already owned a perfectly fine garlic press. Or the flat-woven rugs we got last month, anticipating the day that Lydia begins to crawl.
Definitely the nearly empty 2L dish soup I bought (when full) for two dollars at an estate sale in Berkeley.
Lately, as I walk through our home I feel like I can see how all these disparate pieces fit together. Not as my estate of broken estates, but as Lydia’s childhood home.
And maybe that’s all an estate has ever been.