I said I'd post some pictures. Here are a couple of before-and-after pairs.

The attic, Room 2.

Before:

  "Daunting" would be my adjective of choice.

and

After

 Some of the furniture was moved there after the room was cleared.

May I say how awed I am by HH's diligence in getting the room to the state where it could be used to store other items?


Not every room looks more spacious now:

This was the computer room (originally the boy's bedroom):

 

It was the only place to put the china.

  That's what 19 sets of china look like (four have found homes), as well as assorted tea and dessert sets.

 

Being Part 2 of the stories I shared with my local free weekly:

Many of us have winnowed the contents of a family home. During the process, siblings relive shared experiences, solve old mysteries, discover long-hidden secrets. Yet somehow, for me, when the final drawer has been sorted, the last box vanishes into a Goodwill store, or the last sofa is homeward bound in the pick-up, the experience of cleaning out a house comes down to fruitcake.

 (Photo: Stu Spivak and Wikipedia)

That’s right, fruitcake. The butt of countless jokes: “Fruitcakes make ideal gifts. No delivery service has been able to find a way to damage them.” “There’s really only one fruitcake in the world. It gets passed from person to person, because no one will eat it.” “Fruitcake lasts forever.” And then there's the Edward Gorey Christmas card of Victorians dropping their fruitcakes through the ice, which we actually sent out years ago.

If you read my earlier entry, you'll know that HH found a fruitcake during archaeological excavations in one attic.

As soon as he called, “Check this out!” everyone came running. Any break from the monotony of yet another dresser full of tea towels, a basket of gloves, or a trunk of little boy summer shorts was welcome. (At that point we had not yet discovered all the china.)

The others may have been astounded. I was not. This was not my first encounter with the tinned “delicacy.” (Please hold all comments on what appears to be my opinion of fruitcake until you read my post-script.)

When I was in college, back in the days before digital cameras and blogs, my grandmother’s diabetes, which she’d had for thirty or forty years, went out of control, sending her into a nursing home. That summer, it fell to my mother, my younger sister, and me to clean out the small house where Gram had lived for over a decade, following my grandfather’s death. Working one or two afternoons a week, we made our way through the kitchen and the living spaces. It didn’t take long to discover how fond that generation was of decorative metal tins—one held black and white snapshots, another embroidery floss, a third was filled with buttons. (We've found similar tins of buttons during the Great Sorting--two large ones.)

We reached Gram’s bedroom. Because I was the tallest, I was delegated the task of clearing the closet shelf. I removed extra blankets, several shoe boxes of papers. The last box tapped something farther back on the shelf. Even on tiptoe, I couldn’t see what it was, and, being a teenager, saw no point in fetching the stepstool. I stood as high on my toes as I could and reached as far back as possible, until my fingertips teased at what I could tell was a tin. What would this one hold?

I eased it into view. Although time may have played its usual tricks, in memory, the sides were a sunny yellow that matched the afternoon light filtering through the window shade. As soon as the tin could be lifted from the shelf, it became apparent that it was heavier than those we had found earlier. Taking care not to drop it on my head or my toe, where it might do serious damage, I lowered it to eye level.

The lid read something like “Tastee Golden Fruitcake.” The tin was unopened, the key still firmly attached to the bottom, near a date stamp that had expired several years earlier. We stared, jaws dropped, for several minutes, trying to fathom why a diabetic had a fruitcake on the shelf in her closet. Finally my mother said, “At least Mother didn’t eat it,” before she took it from me and dropped it in the trash.

*  *  *

 
This past spring, when Greg started to toss his recent discovery into a garbage bag, I cried, “Wait!”

“I want to open it,” I explained. “I want to see if fruitcakes do last forever.”

 

I turned the tin over. It was immediately obvious that, even if fruitcakes lasted forever, the key openers did not. This one was rusted fast to the bottom of the tin. Dang! Months earlier, going through a kitchen drawer, I had thrown out a jailer’s worth of key openers, both large and small. Previous experience should have taught me that houses needing to be cleaned often harbor fugitive fruitcakes. If only I’d had more foresight!

 

A can opener would work, and I had come across one in another kitchen drawer. However, that was all the way downstairs, past more piles of things sorted and unsorted. I set the fruitcake tin aside, intending to take it with me when we went downstairs for lunch, and inevitably, with all the boxes and bags and trunks to be sorted, I soon became distracted.

 

One weekend in June, the memory of the fruitcake tin returned. With it came the determination to document the event for science. As soon as we arrived at the house, I marched up to the attic, found the tin (exactly where we had left it), and tromped back down the stairs to find the can opener. With the help of able assistant and trained photographer, BD, we have proof:

     Before

 

 The test is under way.





 

            Time for the Drum roll—


  Bwaaahaaaahaaaaa!

And there it is, the proof that fruitcake does not, in fact, last forever. Any more than sorting out a house does (even though it sometimes feels like it might).

 

If you’ve never had to clear out a house, if you are dreading the experience, if you are fearing it, take heart. By the end, you’ll have some great stories. But be careful. You never know where you’ll find that fruitcake.

 

P.S. Homemade, properly aged (30-45 days) fruitcake is something to savor, with a cup of hot tea, on a cold winter’s day. At some point after Thanksgiving, I make one, filled with raisins, currants, candied peel and lots of nuts, both ground and chopped, all soaked in brandy. After baking, the cake is brushed with more brandy. Come Christmas and New Year's, a slice is not only in order, but welcome. HH will attest to it.

(c) 2009 Katherine Quimby Johnson

Sorting Stuff

 
We’ve been called the sandwich generation, but what they don’t tell us is that some of our days are going to be filled with, well, stuff. Specifically our parents’ stuff, or, if you want to take a slightly wider view, family stuff. This is not meant figuratively; I’m not talking about wills and paperwork and decisions about nursing homes, although those need to be made, too. I mean physical, tangible stuff. All the things that accumulated during the however many years they lived in their homes.
 

For the past seven months, my husband’s surviving siblings and their spouses, my husband (Greg), and I, with occasional help from our college-age daughter, have spent our weekends in Connecticut, clearing out the house my husband’s parents’ purchased in 1948. We have discovered the Motherlode of Stuff.

  One side of Attic II, Room 1, in April  (photo: KQJ).


 Attic II, Room 2, in April (photo KQJ)

The whole house was not as bad as the attics, but we did find over 300 men's ties in the master bedroom, covering fashion history from the straight and narrow '50s to the swinging '70s and on through today.

 The ties HH chose to bring home clearly cover the spectrum. (photo KQJ)

We found

Gloves for all seasons, from an elbow-length lavender pair fit to wear to a ball to the navy single-button ones that every grandmother wore for fall in the 1950s and early ’60s. Alas, our hands are all too large.
 

Hats, also for all seasons, (to go with the gloves, of course).

  "I'm my own grandma" (photo L. Johnson)

 

   
Vogue, circa 1956? (photo L. Johnson)

Annie Hall, anyone? (photo KQJ)

We found
 

Toys, from a worn-out stuffed sheep to a still-wrapped snap-together wooden train engine and car that didn’t make it to my husband in Christmas 1956. (More on that Christmas in a bit.)

Table linens, tea towels, and doilies, some hand made by Nana, some by various great aunts, some brought back from trips to Sweden or Scotland. 
 

China, 18 sets of it (to date), from florid Nippon-ware, no doubt purchased while Uncle Harry was on leave from Korea (Harry was career military and married to Aunt Ena), to a set purchased for some unknown reason in 1978. Each set serves anywhere from six to 14 people.
 

 Some of the Nipponware. In the background you can see a small tea pot that is missing its lid. Until the last box is opened, the tea pot won't be delegated to the yard sale. A decanter found in the attic was eventually reunited with its stopper, which was in a box in the basement. (photo KQJ)

18 sets of china?!!
 

I promise you, I'm not making that number up. In the beginning, my best guess for the number of sets of china in the house would have been six, including one in the basement that Nana left to my sister-in-law. However, that number isn’t as excessive as it seems. Once upon a time, in that world where women wore gloves and hats whenever they went out, three sets of china were standard in what my grandmother would have called “a respectable house.” One set was for breakfast, one for everyday, and one, the “good china,” was only used on Sundays and holidays.
 

But still—18 sets of china?

I can explain. While this house was, indeed, crammed so full that family fans of “Dr. Who” speculated it was a Tardis machine, the contents are not simply one couple’s lifetime accumulation. As Greg and his brother and sister began to recognize specific items, it became possible to say, “What’s in the attic over the garage came from Nana’s,” or “What’s in the back corner of the second room of the other attic is from the first time Aunt Ena stayed with us.” (Ena was one of the first group of wives to go to Germany after World War II, but she could not follow Harry to Korea.) Between grandparents, maiden great-aunts and aunts, the equivalent of at least five households worth of stuff ended up in my in-law’s house.

Simple mathematics (3 x 6=18) thus shows that the total number of sets of china is that necessary for respectability. Of course, the numbers don’t include partial sets of china, or tantalizing remnants of sets—a cup, saucer, and platter, for instance.

We will not keep it all. No more than we wear gloves or hats every day, do we have cupboard space in our homes for more than, at most, two sets of dishes. Still, there is enough, and in enough variety, for each sibling and each grandchild to have a pattern that is to his or her liking. Making the choice is like a birthday, or Christmas, only without the wrapping paper.

  My dishes, a mix of two different patterns (one set is a partial--platter and serving bowl, dessert plates, six saucers, no cups). (photo: KQJ)

Speaking of Christmas, that holiday in 1956 must have been a doozie. The bag of unwrapped presents, found in the dining room closet, can be dated because, in addition to the wooden train, it contained a cookbook, published in 1956, by the Dorcas Society of the Emanuel Lutheran Church in Manchester, CT.



In 1956 Greg, the youngest of the family, would have been a month old, and his older brothers barely two and not quite four respectively. I once asked his mother what it was like to have three boys so close together and she said, "I don't remember. It's all just a blur."  It's easy to see how a bag of presents could be put in a closet, to be dealt with later, and then forgotten. A packing box we found in the attic was postmarked with the same year. That box contained more wrapped presents, including decorative china, some unmentionable substances identifiable as chocolate only because of the box they were in, and a fruitcake that will be a tale for another day.