The Weight of Things

Woman in Yellow - Alfred Stevens ca. 1866 - Lightner Museum

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Objects embody stories. Those stories give them meaning.

If my house burned down, would you know which items were the greatest loss? Which teapot? Which lamp?

Mid-century Danish dining table? Or broken clay dog?

Some call it sentimental, but these stories remind us who we are.

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Last month I visited the Lightner Museum in St. Augustine, FL. I’ve been there many times. The draw for this trip was a special exhibition of the Gilded Age. 

The museum is, in fact, a Gilded Age showcase, so I’d already seen many of the items on display and mostly breezed by the Tiffany lamps, but the painting pictured above made me pause. How many moments have I spent in the last few years gazing at mere things while memories thwart my ability to make objective decisions?

A cheap strand of beads—but Mom loved this color. A millefiori bunny with a broken ear—but it was my grandmother’s. In it I see her living room, where so many Christmas mornings were spent. I smell Granddaddy’s cigar smoke.

The painting’s placard reads: “…the artist depicts his subject toying wistfully with a pearl necklace plucked from a jewelry box. Is the necklace a treasured family heirloom? A gift from a lover?...”

On my exit from the galleries, I began chatting with the information booth lady. She also works at the new shipwreck museum in town. Working there has changed her perspective on the Lightner objects. 

The Lightner holds random treasures gathered by a collector who displayed them in his amusement palace for wealthy tourists escaping their northern cities in winter.

The shipwreck finds, whether a coin or an emerald ring, are personal items lost by the passengers who died at sea.

Oof.

Her observation completed the circuit that had been flickering in my brain—my paralysis, the painting, the sense of holy ground when sifting through the belongings of others... the stuff of life.

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I once visited a house that struck me as odd. The place felt like it had been decorated in a single day via Pottery Barn. I looked around and could find nothing that hinted at a backstory for my new friends, no cracked vase, no dog-eared books. It did not feel like a home. It felt staged. But for a stage set, I would have dinged up the paint on the doorframe here, placed a worn carpet there, a prized baseball on a bookshelf.

Even an artificial world needs an implied history to be convincing.

I’ve used objects of importance in my novel. They are tropes, plot points, but tropes come from our shared experience. Whether in fiction or in real life, we give objects meaning. It’s what we do.

Do you find it hard to let go of items you associate with memories? I’d love to know.