"Trinkets" by Suzanne Fernandez Gray
—gewgaws all gone
Aunt Polly’s collected things collect themselves on table tops and counter tops and in boxes in the basement. A touching story.
Suzanne Fernandez Gray is a writer who divides her time between Texas and the Bluegrass region of Kentucky. Her essays and poetry have appeared in several publications including Fourth Genre, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, Brevity Blog, The Ekphrastic Review and Solstice Literary Magazine, where her essay “Bridge of Cards” won the 2017 Nonfiction Award. She is currently at work on a memoir about life, loss, love, living between cultures and the hazards of diving too deeply into the family tree.
Author’s Talk
Suzanne Fernandez Gray
Writing “Trinkets”
This essay was born from another story. Several years ago, my elderly neighbor Louise fell in her home and broke a hip. She spent the next two years in a rehabilitation facility and during that time, at the request of her daughter who lived out of state, I kept an eye on her home letting the gas company in to read the meter, picking political flyers out of the crease in the storm door and doing a periodic walk through to check for roof leaks after bad weather. To go into Louise’s impeccable house was to tour a life interrupted. Everything was just as she left it the morning she fell, with artful displays arranged to be admired. When she died, her daughter packed a U Haul with a few things, but left much, inviting me to help myself to whatever I might want the day before the auctioneers arrived to take the rest. Though the house was now half empty, her presence was still so strong, I found myself unable to take much more than a few art books, a subject we both loved.
The auctioneers came when it was nearly dark, so I paid no attention to their work, but the aftermath of it became apparent when I backed my car out of the driveway the next morning. In the rearview mirror I spied two enormous mounds of Louise’s things haphazardly discarded for the coming trash truck. It was snowing and a thin film of white glazed the twin piles. The sadness of the scene overwhelmed me, and I opened my trunk and began tossing in things I had no use for- a decorative box, a photograph framed with a blue ribbon from the 1959 Kentucky State Fair, blank canvases and more books.
I tried to write about that moment several times but could never fashion an essay from that experience. I have come to believe it was because I didn’t fully understand how overwhelming it can be to make decisions about how to dispose of a loved one’s belongings when they seem to so fully inhabit them. A few years later, I’d lose a close family member and it was as if life had returned to a familiar theme. When I returned to the page, this time to write about Aunt Polly, the words were there.
