Handling so many of my mother's tiny things in order to pack them carefully has me thinking about possesions and how we interact with them.

Once, long ago, my mother came to Austin with a couple of friends. We put them up in our house and they went to a meeting of miniature ethusiasts. At the meetings, I think there are workshops where people make tiny things. People sell little things. Display little rooms and houses and such. Some people just buy stuff and assemble it. Some of this stuff is made in the third world on assembly lines. Others make stuff with exacting scale and wonderful workmanship. My mother wove wonderful coverlets 'in scale' for her rooms sometimes and made other things. She also used pieces that were purchased...fine ones, some of them, some of them mass-produced.

Anyway, my mother brought these other women. One was fairly young. She was a large, ungainly woman and was married, I think. After they'd been at the event for the first day, they came back here and were showing things they made and bought. This woman had purchased a tiny wine carafe with fake wine and little glasses. It was cute but mass-produced. She said, "I've always wanted a wine set."

To me it sounded like she'd wanted a real carafe with an old Bordeaux and elegant glasses to clink with real, life-sized friends. I remembered as a child how I would play with our dollhouses and their cheap plastic furniture and people, making up stories and fantasies. I didn't like dolls but I did like this stuff because it fueled my childish fantasies about real life. Hearing this adult, I had the feeling she was moving into the dioramas like a child would. It gave me pause.

Now, don't get me wrong. I don't think my mom did this. I think she enjoyed making these things (even when she merely assembled the rooms), she enjoyed making accessories or furniture or weaving the rugs or coverlets. The challenge of making it and then entertaining other people with them. She'd show people around the house like the docent in a museum. Dad does this now, trying hard to remember something about the pieces. She was very acquisitive about this stuff, though, and the stuff of other hobbies and collections. She liked to own things and never quite got over her childhood of the depression, her need to stock up on things. Of course, she worked hard to get me things and to let me end up with a house cluttered with my own obsessions. (Which, of course, make far more sense than hers. Not.)

Dad and I gave away a little 'room box' of a Chinese restaurant. We gave it to a woman who has been a dear friend to both Mom and Dad. My sister told me to retrieve a small elephant from this box, that it was valuable. (I know...I didn't think it belonged in there either.) Anyway, I told her yeah I'd try, whatever. But I thought to myself, "We are all going to die. And when we do...nobody will care where the elephant is."

So that's my motto now and I'm going to try to carry it over to my own possessions. When you are dead (and we one day will be) nobody will care where the elephant is. Your deeds may revuberate in the world, but the possessions you managed to keep close by or sell at high prices matter not at all.

And I guess I'm looking at my possessions and thinking that one day they will look silly (or valuable or amusing or burdensome or wonderful) to someone else. Things are not us but they represent us while we are around. Then their meaning drains away and they become objects in a junk store, a meaningless jumble.