The dump trucks rattling with gravel were bad. Worse were the cement mixers lined up down the street, one of them stretched like a growling triceratops across our driveway. I had to plow over a flower bed to leave my own house.
But it was the masonry drills that sent me over the edge. An entire day of screaming masonry drills will drive a person to madness.
In the back of our family room, 50 feet from the construction site that was once our late neighbor’s home, stands the old plywood table where I habitually write. My husband built it for our children’s perpetual artmaking. On that table, it didn’t matter if they spilled paint or glue or glitter. There is no way to ruin plywood.
As our sons grew, that table became the place for homework sheets, and then for laptops. After the last boy left for college, I claimed it for my own work. Tucked beneath four windows that open onto bird feeders and a pollinator garden, it spans nearly the width of the room. I wrote three books there.
Now my writing table overlooks a construction site.
In the immortal words of Taylor Swift, this is a champagne problem. In fact, I have an actual home office. It’s the size of a walk-in closet, but it happens to be as far from the construction as I can get without squashing a flower bed.
In recent years, my little office has served mostly as a time capsule. It’s both a relic of the days when I hid away to work while a sitter kept the children entertained and the place where I pile all the books and papers and mementos that I don’t know what to do with or can’t bear to discard. When the drilling started, I had no choice but to make my office functional again.
In the process I discovered a box of marigold seeds, collected God only knows how long ago,. I lingered over the preschool artwork and the kindergarten love letters (“I luov mi mom becuz she is az prite as a budrfly”) and a birthday horoscope on newsprint so old the paper is golden: “The calendar and weather suggest a different time of year,” it reads, “but inside you are on the cusp of a spring awakening.”
What to do with the stack of holiday cards? Whole families of children grew up between one end of that stack and the other. What to do with the graduation pictures, the wedding invitations, the birth announcements, the funeral programs? Why did I save so many copies of the lyrics to “I’ll Fly Away”?
It was a little overwhelming. I considered asking to borrow the backhoe from the construction site next door.
Then I began to read the letters. A birthday card from my father-in-law, written in a shaky hand: “Thank you for all you do for me.”
A prayer card from my godmother.
A thank-you note for a poundcake. When my friend’s father died unexpectedly, my mother told me to bake a poundcake, slip it into the kitchen and leave it by the coffeepot. Friends will be dropping by, she said, and the family will need something to offer them.
Now she is gone, too, and so are my father-in-law and my godmother.
I read the letters I’d saved from former teachers, also gone now, and from former students, now grown up. So many letters from people whose handwriting I still recognize across the decades. I hardly know my own children’s handwriting, so rarely do they write to me by hand, but I would know my favorite professor’s penmanship from across the room.
As the hours unfolded, I felt my exasperation give over to joy. This small, messy life of mine, this one brief, brief life has unfolded in such interlocking connection to so many other lives! It’s impossible to know where the connections began, impossible to imagine that they could ever end. In time, the backhoes and the masonry drills will come for this house, too, but in the meantime it holds all the reminders — now packed away into boxes beneath my desk and in the bottom of my closet — of so many people I love.
I come from a long line of savers. I am the caretaker of photos going back to the early 20th century. I have my grandmother’s christening gown and wedding dress. I still have my grandfather’s love letters to my grandmother and my father’s love notes to my mother. Without the help of these treasures, I could not have written my first book.
Nevertheless, I find myself feeling in the dark for a moral to this story of what I have lost and what I have saved, this tale of weary petulance transformed into gratitude. Why am I saving Christmas cards printed with pictures of other people’s children? Or finger paintings by my own children, who will never want to reclaim them? These are fair questions.
But I think of my beloved mother-in-law and the boxes of memories she inherited when she and my father-in-law retired to the house where she grew up. I remember how she would set a box on the kitchen table, planning to throw out all but the most meaningful items. She would read every brittle letter, every faded card and crumbling clipping, and then she would pack it all back up again and slide it into a corner of her bedroom.
I write now from my desk in this newly tidy office. It’s pleasant enough. Most of the time I can hardly hear the work of the new house going up where my late neighbor’s home used to be.
A day will come when the new house, too, will crumble into dust, but it’s hard to think about a future so far ahead. Even sitting on the floor of my office and looking through all those Christmas cards, watching child after child grow up in hyperdrive, as in a flip book, or studying the artwork of my children, now men — even then, the fleeting nature of this life hardly real. Memories are as alive in me as the present moment, but the future isn’t so much as a dream.
Well, Old Time is still a-flying, as the poet knew, and I know, too. But it’s also climbing and looping, diving and looping again. If I have learned anything, it’s that Old Time is a skywriter, and the message he leaves in the endless blue brightness is only this: Love it all.