I have a folder on my computer marked “things”…which, some folks, like my husband, for example, would label junk. This folder contains photographs of excavated items from my childhood home, which my sister and I have been attempting to empty, more or less, since our mother passed away 3 years ago.
Things include such e-bay specialty items such as 6 inch plastic mouse with huge ears and metal spectacles, greeting cards featuring Clark Gable, a vintage Blowing Rock bumper sticker, Star Trek buttons, a stuffed ET, and an undated National Geographic map with countries that no longer exist, just to name a few.
Although they seem well contained in that computer folder, they are anything but that in real life. They are in overstuffed envelopes, plastic containers, paper bags, and cardboard boxes, taking up residence in my garage, guest bedroom, two closets and even the trunk of my car.
And these are the “things”…never mind the items neatly tucked in other folders labeled vintage clothes, western collectibles, books, etc.
Yet, even with this overflow of stuff from my childhood and my parents’ lives, I am still ahead of the game compared to my sister. Personal research on the topic has led me to the conclusion that I am a concealer hoarder. When you walk into my house, things appear orderly. There are no piles of papers or clothes to climb over, no unmarked boxes lining the hallway, no table surfaces buried beneath layers of stuff, nothing that would immediately make you suspect of my sanity except for, perhaps, the artificial saguaro cactus in my living room, or the real tumbleweed beneath the kiva ladder leading to no where inside my very 70’s traditional ranch home.
But even hidden away the stuff weighs heavy on my mind. There are those sleepless late nights when I visualize myself leaping out of bed, bursting into my middle bedroom and frantically tossing cherished issues of Sunset magazine, childhood coloring books and clothes from what my daughter calls my 80’s closet into the hallway until I can breathe again.
Usually, these moments will pass, occasionally with the aid of Advil PM.
My hairdresser, another admitted hoarder of all things cool, understands and not just because she’s my hairdresser and required, by some unspoken rule of her trade, to humor crazy clients.
“Sometimes just looking at things from a different time and place in your life makes you feel good, bringing back happy memories,” she philosophizes as she lathers my hair with brown looking goop, she has concocted so I can do just that.
Yes, I’m thinking, there must be some drug released during that visual process, the exact opposite of the one produced during my sudden nighttime anxieties.
And then I remember the recent discovery of a treasure lying on a rusted metal storage rack on my parent’s carport. It was a thin paperback book, Sea of Grass, sandwiched, between two roach riddled hard back novels I would have simply tossed as I did with others when my sister was not looking.
The cover featured a painting of a familiar looking male and female in western clothing. Without my glasses, I couldn’t read the date or the description on the back cover but I knew it was most likely from the 40’s. I thought, this might be interesting and, perhaps, it could go on Amazon.
Later that night with bright lights and my glasses on, I recognized the couple as Spencer Tracy and Katherine Hepburn. I was surprised to see their likeness on the cover of a western novel, not aware of any movies of that genre they had done together. The author, Conrad Richter, seemed familiar too, although I wasn’t sure how or why. The paperback was the novel version of a serialized western he had written a few years previously in 1936 for Post magazine. Since it was set inNew Mexicoand mentioned places I knew, I thought I just might read this and then set it down.
Sometime later that evening (about the time I should have been in bed), I picked the book up again and started to read, putting it down with 20 pages to go but only 4 hours left to sleep for the night.
I finished it early the next evening while my husband was watching a dissection of some sort on yet another CSI. The novel did not end as I thought it would, much to my surprise. Considering the nature of the conflicts, how could it possibly have had a somewhat happy ending? And yet it did. What literary devices, parallels was I missing? It obviously was not an ordinary western or an ordinary romance novel although it had characteristics of both.
The English teacher in me was intrigued enough to do some research and as skeptical as I am of Wikipedia, I think they nailed it.
It is set in New Mexico in the late 19th century, and concerns the clash between rich ranchers, whose cattle range freely through the vast sea of grass, and the farmers, or “nesters,” who build fences and turn the sod. It is an epic depiction of the end of the cowboy era in the American Southwest. Against this background is set the triangle of rancher Jim Brewton, his unstable Eastern wife Lutie Cameron, and ambitious Brice Chamberlain. Richter casts the story in Homeric terms, with the children caught up in the conflicts of their parents.
I learned a lot from reading the book and researching the author, the book, and the movie. And although my house is brimming with many treasures already, both mine and my parents’, this aged little paper book is yet another one, one that connected my interests, my love of New Mexico, its sea of grass, western romance novels, old movies, etc. to my mother, and most likely her father, my grandfather, whose book, I suspect it once belonged.
And yes, it made me feel good.
