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Bequeathing life as time passes on

By ELIZABETH BETTENDORF
Published July 14, 2006

The last of the sentimental family treasures have mostly been sold or changed hands among my two sisters and me.

In the past year, my youngest sister sold my mother's 1950s French provincial bedroom set to a friend, and my middle sister recently offered me an ebony-black credenza that stood for a half century by the front door of our grandmother's cottage in Chicago.

I said no.

I've decided I have enough already.

I have my grandmother's wooden pepper grinder and the first painting my mother ever made as a child, an ice-blue mountain stream flanked by tall trees and displayed in a primitive wood frame without glass.

It's a bittersweet moment in every family when the possessions that made each house a home, the familiar, well-used objects that are forever traced into our memories, are finally divvied up for the last time.

At night, I sometimes close my eyes and still wander through each of our relative's houses and then through every home we ever lived in.

I roam from room to room, house to house, touching a mirrored, Italian glass bedroom set in my grandmother's elegant Florida house, and sink into her matching white easy chairs in her garden room.

Then I go to our childhood home, sit at the modern kitchen table where, over a span of high-school years, we did countless hours of homework. I think about the pingpong table that stood in the basement there for years, a magnet for rollicking tournaments with each other, dates and friends.

I have no idea where it went.

Sure, some things were dispensed with at estate sales, divided up after deaths, given away to friends.

But a few, we kept for ourselves: decorating our first apartments with reupholstered 1970s chairs, with the coffee tables where our relatives once folded their newspapers or sipped evening cocktails.

Of course, it's impossible to hang on forever to every stick of family furniture. But it's a wonder to me how a lifetime's worth of a family's accumulated possessions are so fleeting - no matter how hard we try to hang on to them. Even the most cherished trinkets are dispensed with at just about every life passage: marriage, moves, downsizing.

It's more of an issue in Florida where only a lucky few have attics or basements, and the cost of storage seems to climb with the cost of real estate.

So when a letter arrived a few weeks ago from the Tampa storage facility where I have for years stowed a small museum of family heirlooms, I knew it was my turn to do the dispensing.

The letter stated that property had been sold - to make way for condos - and that the storage building would be torn down.

Everything I own has to be out by July 31.

No matter how I look at it, no matter how many ways I crunch the numbers, the math doesn't change: Too many possessions require a storage locker, and storage lockers cost money.

Let me confess right now that I already have another storage locker that I've vowed to deal with before year's end. But this locker remains heaped with furniture from the past, including my antique dressing table and bench, a birthday gift from my parents one year, and a sweet looking table and chairs once belonging to my grandparents.

Regardless of what I decide, this much is certain: It will cost several hundred dollars to hire someone to cart everything out of the building and haul it away.

Moving things from one storage locker to another is out of the question. So is offering it to consignment stores.

And I know that cramming my tiny home and closets with more stuff actually lowers my home's resale value, unless I plan to haul it all back into storage someday.

This much I've learned in my years of covering homes: Antique furniture, unless it's of the finest provenance, usually doesn't appeal to Floridians. More than one consignment dealer has told me that he can't sell the stuff down here.

"Don't pay to put old furniture in storage," one shop owner warned. "It's not worth it."

So, the last of the family things are finally going, and I, the oldest daughter, keeper of ancestral heirlooms, stand at the end of the line.

I'm hanging on to the most sentimental of sentimental, and then paying someone strong with a big truck to haul the rest to charity.

Everything goes, including a few things of my own that will never get passed down.

[Last modified July 13, 2006, 12:35:13]