Category: Humor

Odds and Ends, Mostly Odds

Published on by Martha Mattingly PayneLeave a comment
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Egg carton top, saved in paper sack labelled “Nice picture.”

I’m headed back to the attic today. It’s a steep ascent, one it’s hard to imagine my parents having climbed at all as they aged, much less bearing the swollen boxes they toted up over the years. But tote they did, well into their 80s, sometimes making it only as far as the dusty bank of shelves that runs alongside the staircase. The stuff of these shelves represents a variety of eras, and is often laughable (see egg carton remains). In fact, I can hear mom now, kicking back with her fresh copy of To the Lighthouse (Woolf was a particular favorite) and chuckling at our labors. It is Our, by the way. We’re a small village up here. Otherwise, this project would be endless, so here’s a shout-out to my sister and sisters-in-law, my daughter and nieces. We get by with a little help from our friends, and along the way we laugh, a lot.

Swim cap
Swim cap
"Travel Cosmetics"
“Travel Cosmetics”

So put away the tissues and come on over to the lighter side, the pack-rattier side, where my mother reveals her true hoarding colors, and proud of ’em. At left, Exhibit One: A swim cap. My mother liked to swim, sort of. At low tide, she was wont to pull on such a cap to wade knee-deep into the sunny Atlantic as my father floated just beyond. Now and then, she took a few free-style passes through the gentle waves, but the last time I witnessed her taking her lady-like dip was in the early 1990s. Yet here we have a nearly new cap, tucked in its original Jantzen bag, along with the receipt (from Atlanta Beach?!?) because who knows when one might be inspired to fetch down such a treasure for return. It might have gained value!

Above right, Exhibit Two: A cardboard pear crate, its compartments jammed with miniature toiletries pilfered from any number of hotels and motels around the globe, their lotions and shampoos gone stiff and gummy with age. Taped on the lid is a note that reads “Travel Cosmetics” in my mother’s neat cursive. Oh how she loved to travel, and were she still doing so today, she’d have no trouble getting her carry-on through security.

The lady preferred Hanes
The lady preferred Hanes

Final Exhibit (for today) and perhaps my favorite: Stacks and stacks of old catalogues–Calico Curtains, Pierre Deux (ooo, la, la), and Hanes’ Underwear. Did my mother prefer Hanes? The jury is out. Certainly Maidenform bras, generic girdles and flannel PJs populated her lingerie drawers, but these were jumbled drawers. A Hanes’ cami could very well have been in there somewhere.

Well, I’ve developed a case of the sneezes and the recycle bin is full. The Christmas card collection will have to wait. I’ll leave you with one last gem–the program from one of my brother’s Pop Warner football tournaments (in 1954!). With four boys in the house, there were lots of sports being played. Mom wasn’t much of a fan, but it seems she was paying attention after all, and keeping up best she could.

Go Team!
Go Team!

Of Ghosts and Goldfish

Published on by Martha Mattingly Payne2 Comments

IMG_2757Before I leave the sewing room (fully reserving the right to return), a word about ghosts. I don’t much believe in them, but I’ve come to expect them nevertheless. This is a contradiction I can live with, and nowhere do I experience it more than among the stuff of my mother’s creative passion. Maybe it’s the dusty Butterick patterns stuffed into drawers, or the wooly smell of the moth-eaten skirts in the closet, or the sweet droop of the faded curtains that hang over the table where Mom used to spin her magic, whether finishing up her mother-of-the-groom dress within hours of the rehearsal dinner, or whipping in a final buttonhole on an outfit for me in the wee hours of Christmas morning. But somehow I, a non-believer, can feel my mother standing beside me, looking over my shoulder, ready to cry foul when I dump her treasures into my industrial-strength trash bag.

“But Mother—it’s a mess in here. Look at the dust bunnies around the rusted bobbins that are balanced over the old tailor’s ham that’s perched on those remnant boxes … under the bed!”

“We-e-l-l-l, Marth. I’ll think about that—tomorrow,” says my mother-spirit. “Ok then, Scarlet,” she adds with an ironic roll of her Vivienne Leigh eyes. A smart, self-mocking specter, she’s proud to have snatched up the Gone With the Wind reference before I could pounce. IMG_0621

Mom seems happy in this hybrid room, as she always was before, and she’s got company. There in the corner are my miniature pet turtles, dripping with salmonella. Their soft bellies bared, they teeter on tiny green feet and scratch at their plexi-glass prison, just as they did in life. And over here, on the table beside the bed, Oscar the goldfish—who like all domestic carp, got his death sentence the minute I dumped him out of his bloated plastic bag—swishes about unawares in water no one warned me to de-chlorinate. Best of all, my gal pals sit crisscross-applesauce on my pink gingham bedspread, fans of Crazy Eight cards in hand and boxes of Red Hots in their laps. It’s way past our bedtime. I can tell from their soft giggles and the still darkness at the window.

I feel better now. Once I’m done ditching yards of mildewed swatches and sorting all the buttons for Goodwill, I’ll be okay to leave this room behind. It’s a good cozy place. Maybe some young couple will recognize that it would make a perfect nursery. A changing table would be nice under the window, and a bassinette could fit beside the closet that leads to the master. But they needn’t bother with a music box. The tap of a shadowy foot on a pedal, the snip-snip of threads, the phantom whirr of a Singer engine going full steam–these were my lullaby, and I slept like a baby.

Mom
Mom
Vivienne … See what I mean?
Vivienne Leigh, alias Scarlet O’Hara
Mom
Mom
Vivienne
Vivienne–See what I mean?

All Buttoned Up

Published on by Martha Mattingly Payne4 Comments

Button drawer There’s something pleasing about the button–simple yet functional, often bright, sometimes shiny, and usually a circle–sun, moon, wheel, life. So primal, and yet, somehow divine, and my mother had ‘em by the dozens! Before I wax on, a disclaimer—two entries in and already I’ve moseyed out of my mother’s attic (it’s cold up there!). Down the splintered stairs and up the drafty hallway I go to the sewing room, which began its life as my bedroom. Question—does it count as a bedroom if there’s no bathroom within ten yards? The baby of the family, I was two when my parents built their dream home, so naturally I got the bedroom that wasn’t. I figured it was normal to scuttle through a closet and hopscotch between highboy and hope chest to get to the potty. The house that has fallen silent now was crowded and chaotic then, four brothers, two of them teenagers, sharing a pair of bedrooms and a Jack ‘n Jill bath, plus my sister, who at eighteen wasn’t keen on the idea of sharing much of anything. Who could blame her? She’d survived childhood (including semi-annual, seven-hour station-wagon rides to Florida) while sharing her space with four rowdy boys. She deserved a bed and bath of her own and what did I care? I loved that only that narrow closet jammed with shoes and worn bathrobes and musty boxes marked, For the Scrapbook! separated me from my parents.

Button tinsSo I lived in the sewing room (even then it begged for a Singer and a good sharp pair of shears) and I shared my parents’ bath until I began to teeter at the brink of adolescence. Then, blessedly, someone declared it was high time I stopped barging in on dad when he was shaving so I could brush on a little rouge. Which brings us back to buttons. Or does it. I’ve moseyed again, this time way off the subject. But my mother did collect buttons, which made some sense because she was, one, a woman who disliked being caught off guard, and two, a seamstress. I suppose you’d call her an amateur seamstress. She didn’t sew for money, though she could have. She was good enough, but then, she was good enough at a lot of things to have gone pro but never had the courage. I wish she had. Late in her life, I think she wished she had, too.

IMG_2756

Still, Mom did beautiful work with her needle and thread, and the Chanel suits and St. Johns’ knits she stitched up came to life thanks to those rhinestone buttons up the front or the pop of that mandarin knot at the neck. So what if her eyes went before she could use up the tins full (all carefully ordered, as shown, and color-coded). Wasn’t that better than coming to the end of a long day’s work to find you were out of emerald green studs?

Button up tight everybody, and enjoy the weekend. I’ll be sorting spools of thread while the Seahawks “take the air out of” the Patriots’ sails.

Joe wearing one of her homespun dresses
Mom sporting one of her homespun outfits. Miss you, lovely lady.

Finding the woman within, one toothpick at a time

Published on by Martha Mattingly Payne10 Comments

photo 1

My mother was born in 1919, the year the dial telephone was introduced and WWI drew to a close. J. D. Salinger was a 1919-er, too, along with Eva Gabor, whom mom found silly, Nat King Cole, whose music she loved, Jackie Robinson, whom she never gave the time of day, and Balto, the renowned sled dog. She outlived them all. Against all odds, she liked her chicken fried, her pound cake with a spoonful of heavy cream, her pancakes with a thick slice of real butter, and her nightly glass of Chardonnay full to the brim. She never took a vitamin or swallowed a drop of fish oil, and unless you count a few failed games of croquet, she spent not a single minute of her adult life engaged in organized exercise.

Ok, so she had good genes. Her parents lived into their nineties, too, but I can’t help but think there was more to it than that. What was it about this lady (she was above all, a lady) that made her so resilient? Small but sturdy—5’2” with a playing weight of 106—she survived breast cancer at 81, a serious car accident at 83, the loss of her husband, a bad bout of pneumonia, and perhaps hardest of all, the death of her oldest son when she was 88. Tough as nails, her Hospice nurse called her, and a fighter, though at first glance she seemed anything but. In spite of a failing memory and the accumulation of sorrows that living long brings, she simply loved life. Even in her last difficult years, she clung to the remaining pleasures of her daily routine—a mug of coffee and a plate of eggs in the morning, a raucous visit from her great-grandchildren, an outing to Mass on Saturday evenings. Maybe this was my mother’s greatest legacy: You get up and get out of your pajamas. You engage with whatever is left to you. You hope. It served her well. She hung on as long as a body could, only breathing her last when she couldn’t swallow enough, literally, to keep her little heart beating.

That was last October, and since she’s been gone, I’ve been sifting through what she left behind. And she left behind A LOT, ten closets and an attic filled with dust and mildew and a frightful number of rodent droppings. She hoarded, you might say, (see party toothpicks above) and it’s true that like other members of her generation, my mother spent too much time saving things from the past. Yet somehow, she was always looking to the future, too. This bothered me over the years, the way she and my father never quite got the hang of living in the moment, but maybe we in our endlessly progressive throwaway society would do well to pay attention. As I paw through hundreds of cardboard boxes gone grimy and soft with age, I’m beginning to see that these leftovers are the fruits of my mother’s particular brand of hope. After all, why save every single one of those spare buttons that come with a new blouse if you don’t imagine that one fine day, you’ll wake up and fancy wearing that blouse, and it certainly wouldn’t do to go out with your collar gaping open.

So join me. I’d love the company as I journey into the dingy corners of this moldy and mysterious place, my mother’s attic.

Generational pic, Mothers Day, 2012
Generational pic, Mothers Day, 2012