Three Things I Have Lost

A silver brooch, a voice, a house full of paintings

My Helsinki pin, my father's voice, my childhood paintings now hanging on a stranger's green wall

Thin, long, silver, metal. Even though thin, it was extremely strong, not fragile, not dainty. An angular, tubular stem topped by a flat, 2-dimensional flower, with tiny holes drilled straight through and a jagged upper edge like the peaks of mountains or the outline of some tulips.

We were in Helsinki, this time not in winter drinking pepper vodka at a Russian restaurant to warm up, but walking through the streets unencumbered by puffy coats.

I was there to speak at a conference for human resource professionals, and my husband, John, came with me. I was unprepared for, and mesmerized by, the appearance of a troupe of avant-garde dancers at every coffee break during the conference, dressed like the Blue Man Group, their wiry bodies writhing and reaching to the sky, accompanied by atonal music unusual to my ear. The meaning of it all was hidden to me; I was intrigued in the way the uninformed and unprepared can be. HR professionals in the U.S. aren’t anywhere near this cool, I thought to myself.

After the conference ended, John and I stayed on for a few days to walk around Helsinki together. We happily wandered, noticing things around us, listening to people talk, looking at the birds, peering in shop windows.

In the middle of a block, I saw a storefront and entered. Suddenly, I knew I was mistaken. John had followed me to whisper, “This is somebody’s house; let’s go.” I was confused. I turned to hurry out.

A tall man with an impressive red beard entered the room, chuckling. “It is my studio,” he explained. “And my home.” We apologized, but he invited us to stay. The three of us talked for a long time. Then he showed us his work. He was a jeweler, working in metals. There was one piece that immediately called to me, but I said nothing. Maybe he didn’t sell his work. Maybe it would be far too much for me to afford, and I would feel uncomfortable saying no after asking. I touched it gingerly when he handed it to me so I could see it up close. I held it for a few moments, then smiled and handed it back reverently, like a Japanese CEO once handed me his business card.

We talked some more. The three of us had so much in common. He fixed us strong coffee and served it in beautifully rustic mugs made by a friend of his. I think if we lived in Helsinki or he lived in D.C., we all would have been good friends. As we prepared to leave, he handed me a box to take with me. “A small gift for keeping me company today,” he said.

I opened it when we got back to our hotel. It was the flower brooch I had felt so drawn to. Delight is not a big enough word for what I felt. For many years, I wore that brooch every day. It became a most treasured possession. There was magic in it. I am unsure what drew me to it so instantly, but knowing its creator and understanding his gift also contributed to my love for it.

I don’t know how or when or where I lost it. It did not announce its leaving, but it is gone now. I still long for it,

I remember so many things about my father–his dimples on both sides of his mouth when he smiled, the crinkles around his eyes, his crooked grin, the ways he was respected and loved by so many people, the extreme care he took in polishing his shoes and in inviting me to bleach the whitewall tires on his car with a toothbrush, the smell of the hot lather machine and astringent aftershave in his barbershop downtown, the phrases I heard from him many times—like “If you want a job done right, do it yourself”--his leadership as a church deacon, how he loved the Wrangler blue jeans we gave him for Christmas one year, the way he wore daily the Mickey Mouse watch I bought for his birthday, how he wore his hair combed straight back revealing two receding hairlines joined by a chubby and rounded widow’s peak between them, the time he dyed all that hair jet black to see if we would notice (it looked like shoe polish and looked so bad we dared not mention it), the hurt he felt at being overlooked by his mother who favored his older sister and younger brother, his sunflower square dancing outfit to match my mom’s sunflower dress and big crinoline, the red and white Mustang he refurbished for me when I got my driver’s license, the money he would slip me as I left to drive back to college after a weekend at home. And then the day he died in ICU at Grace Hospital, my mother throwing up in the family room, me calling the preacher to ask him to come, and seeing my mother put her nose in the plastic hospital bag with his clothes in it that we took home instead of him, closing the top around her nose so she could breathe him in.

I remember so much more of Daddy, but I cannot remember the sound of his voice.

In my youth, I proudly claimed the title of “painter.” Classes at the Burke County Recreation Center sealed this achievement for me. I won prizes and sold paintings at the regular Rec Center community shows, not knowing at the time that family friends bought the paintings to return them to my parents. Those red dots indicating “sold” were a badge of honor. Even the most famous artist in our small town, Ruby Ivester, said she loved my paintings and encouraged me. Of course, her husband owned a frame shop, so maybe she had an ulterior motive.

My painting of a large orange monarch butterfly done when I was 11 adorned my family’s den over the fireplace for many years. Two pencil portraits I did as a teenager of my great-grandfather and great-grandmother on my father’s side, framed in grey wood from the old homestead by my mother’s brother, Uncle Max, hung over the dining room table. Those two portraits were likely my best creations. A painting of old-timey ladies in the rain with umbrellas, mostly blue, a handful of still lifes done in oil, which I thought was a very fancy, slightly dangerous, and grown-up medium, and many more. By any objective measure, they were not good art (with the exception of those pencil portraits that I did as a teenager), but I thought they were all beautiful. They were the kind of beautiful only a mother could love, really. I was around 10-11 years old when most of them were created.

They are all gone now. The bank repossessed my mother’s house immediately after her death, but John and I didn’t know that, and when we drove down the mountain to start clearing it out, it was padlocked, with a neon yellow notice from the bank. She had lived in my brother’s basement with Alzheimer’s for company for the last few years of her life. So I guess the warning notices arrived there, and no one opened them—the way mail piles up in a house where someone is slowly disappearing.

The paintings, all my school papers and report cards, my childhood stories and poetry, everything left of my father and stepfather who had both died by then, things I had saved and left there, all those historic front pages of newspapers about Moon landings and assassinated Presidents, childhood toys and old memories, all the family photos, all irretrievably gone. Thrown away by the new owners who bought the house for nearly nothing from the bank, or sold at a yard sale that would have mortified my mother, so focused she was on appearances. The new owners renovated the house and flipped it, selling it for way more than they paid.

A high school classmate sent me a message on Facebook to tell me who had bought the house. I messaged the buyer, hoping to recover at least the art. Instead of expressing empathy and offering the paintings to me or even offering to sell them to me, the owner sent photos of my paintings hung in the rooms of her house. “We love them so much!” she said. “They are so neat!" She blocked me on Facebook soon after.

For a few years, I felt sudden patches of shame about that house sale, garage sale, and vivid, passing memories of what had been lost. My face would go hot and red quickly, my heart would race and feel so big in my chest. But over time, those moments lessened in impact, dissipated in my system, until they no longer held a charge. Instead, I grew thankful that the new owners had done the awful job I would have had, to clear out the house. My mother had filled the house with so many magazines stored under the bed that they lifted the bedframe. The last time we were there before she moved out, we had seen a spare bedroom knee-deep in QVC items she bought late at night when she couldn’t sleep. She lived on the edge of hoarding as the dementia did its work on her brain. It would have been a terrible job to clear out that house. And I would have kept too many objects from it, things made precious only by holding memories.

Instead, it was liberation—a loosening in my chest where the heat used to rise.

Some things I have lost, I still long for. Some, it turns out, were carrying me the whole way down the mountain, waiting to be set down.