Owls in the Attic

Reading about Kate’s attic made me think of my own — and its contents.

Ten boxes of owls. It all began with my grandmother. When she was a young girl.

Her parents took a trip to New York City and brought back gifts for their three daughters – beautiful dresses for my grandmother’s two sisters, and for my grandmother — a plaster owl.

It was good-sized owl, over a foot high, and bore a remarkable resemblance to the real thing. It had been designed to decorate a mantel, a piano, or a bookshelf, in the typical Victorian manner.

For some reason my grandmother hung on to the gift, probably to remind her of the injustices of life, and when my grandfather died and she moved in with us, she brought the owl with her. But she refused to have it in her room, and my mother didn’t want it in our living room, and so eventually it ended up in my father’s studio, where he sometimes used it in a still-life, surrounded by fruit or flowers. But most of the time it collected dust.

And that’s where I think the trouble started. At one of my parents’ studio parties someone got a little tipsy and misheard my father say, “That owl collects dust,” and thought he said, ”I collect owls.” Because shortly thereafter, people began showing up with owls in their pockets, their purses, tucked under their arms, some even arrived by mail at Christmas and on his birthday. They were all sizes and shapes, made of wood, pottery, metal, straw, cotton and plastic. There were drawings and photographs, collages and needlepoints of owls. The question was, where to put them?

We had a recreation room when I was growing up, but it had gradually become the room-where-we-put-anything-we-didn’t-know-what-to-do-with-but-couldn’t-quite-bring-ourselves-to-throw-out. The ping-pong table was still there, and that’s where the owls ended up. It soon came to be known as, “The Owl Room.”

Time passed, And so did my grandmother, and my parents. The house was sold and its contents divided between my brother and me. I got the owls. So there they are, neatly wrapped in newspaper, packed in boxes, waiting — for what? To be rescued and returned to the light of day? Or to be carted off to the Salvation Army? Or – the nearest land-fill? Maybe the next time I have house guests and am forced to clean the attic, I will decide their fate. But not now. Not today. Tomorrow – as Scarlet would say.

Robin Hathaway

Letting Go of the Stuff

(Not my pile of clothes. I found it on the internet.)

This is my second day of cleaning the attic. The occasion is to turn it back into a guest room, since we're having company this weekend. It's really quite a nice room, finished, air conditioned when necessary (unlike the rest of the house), furnished with a big soft comfy bed. The problem is that it's full of my dead projects.

You may or may not know that I knit. I like to do this in the summertime, when the weather is unbearably hot, as an expression of the hope that the autumn will eventually come.

You may or may not know that I like to sew sometimes, that I used to be good at it, that when I was broke I used to make my own clothes. I have a 1963 Kenmore cabinet sewing machine in pickled blond wood, sort of bogus Swedish-loooking, that I bought second-hand from another state worker back when I was a clerk for the Department of Youth and Family Services. Shortly after she sold me the sewing machine her life fell apart completely and she went on the street. I would run into her on State Street sometimes. She would beg cigarette money from me and advise me to oil the sewing machine frequently. She became the prototype for Ruth Ann, the bag lady in Unbalanced Accounts, my first published book.

For a long time now I have had the notion that I could still sew, that I could rock those home-made clothes the way I used to when I was young and svelte. I pore over the fashion magazines avidly, seeking the latest styles. But there's less and less to the clothes, and more and more showing of the little models wearing them. I could sew those dresses, no problem. But I couldn't look like that in them. Most of the work would have to be done on my person.

It's time to pack it in as a Project Runway contestant. Five bags of half-finished crappy projects, knitting, sewing, embroidery, you name it, went out on the curb yesterday. Two bags of old clothes went to the thrift shop. I'm thinking maybe I'll put the sewing machine out too. These days my favorite household appliances are the refrigerator, the stove, the ice cream maker, the red Kitchenaid stand mixer, and the brand new food processor. Food processor! How cool is that! I never had one before.

Farewell to the old projects, hello to the new. I'm going down to the kitchen now and just go ahead and finish getting fat.

Kate Gallison