Underpants: Memories… They’re powerful stuff

By PollyAnna
Reader Columnist

My mother has reached that stage of middle life where she is no longer content being the keeper of her children’s things.

Redistribution is the logical conclusion to the years she spent collecting and preserving all remnants of the adorable, harmless little creatures we were pre-teenhood. As we slowly moved out of the house and scattered across the planet, all the books and nicknacks we’d accumulated became the holders of so many memories. And memories are damn hard to willingly throw away. But this current version of Mom is brave, and practical and tired of the clutter.

“And, goodness knows you don’t want to wait till I’m gone to sort all this stuff out,” she reminds us each time one of us receives a delivery of “Your Things,” often with the original Sharpie labels still scrawled across the tattered, beaten boxes.  

It turns out that there’s quite a range in our preserved memorabilia — from Christmas nutcrackers; to a champion matchbox derby car shaped like a carrot; to a handbuilt dollhouse full of dishware and curtains; to books by Enid Blyton and Roald Dahl and the other British authors we read growing up.

The 2010s shouldn’t have been so kind to our eclectic collections. My parents moved three times in three years, across thousands of miles and an ocean. So, you’d think that by this point, only the really valuable stuff was kept. But, as we receive our redistributed items, some of them are a bit more odd than I remembered. Did I really need to keep that stuffed animal I made from a white knee sock in first grade?  Who in my family purchased the photo book of “101 Ways to Use a Cat?”

This summer, my parents opted to spend their vacation helping my sister Fran and her husband drive a moving van from Illinois to Pennsylvania, and of course, my mom brought along a box of “Your Things” for repatriation with my sister.

One night, as the four of them were unpacking into the new apartment, Fran took a seat and opened the box up. Some books, some pottery, a curious little basket with a lid…

“Oh!” Fran exclaimed, grabbing at the little basket. She flipped the lid off the basket, reached inside and popped a small object straight into her mouth.

My mom stared at her in mild confusion bordering on horror.

“It’s my sucking rock!” Fran said happily, rolling something clunkily around past her teeth so she could get the words out.

“Your what???”

“My sucking rock!”

Fran had been an avid thumbsucker until she started going to school. But, once she was told she was “too old” for keeping her thumb in her mouth, she executed a careful and desperate plan. She secretly chose a rock from off the ground somewhere, stashed it stealthily in her pre-chosen little container and kept it by her bedstand.  Each night, when she had been tucked in under the mosquito netting and left alone, she would pop the pebble into her mouth. And then, fall asleep with it in there.

Mom was horrified.

“Didn’t you realize, you could have fallen asleep and choked on that?” she said. “Or chipped a tooth?”

My 20-something sister smiled happily, nodding, with the rock tucked in her cheek — “of course I knew I ‘couldn’t’ have it.  Why do you think I hid it so carefully?”

It’s still a mystery to all of us why the family biologist would think the proper first reaction was to pop that rock back in her mouth immediately without washing it first. But, you know, memories… they’re powerful stuff.

Pollyanna lives, loves and writes from Sandpoint, where local thrift stores are trying to cope with a sudden, unexpected surge in anonymous donations of British-authored children’s books.