Making sense of your family

In the last couple of days I have been with my siblings in a home that my family has owned for the last 85 years. We are cleaning it out after my two maiden aunts died in about a year of each other. I have learned a lot about my family over the years through many stories that were told to me by one of my two aunts. My grandfather owned a construction company in North Carolina and was very successful. But he also had a reputation as somewhat of a person outside the mold.

The house has the accumulation of a number of generations of family junk and important stuff. We found a collection of political buttons and a bunch of childhood toys and records from about three generations (78s, 33s and CDs). We found a collection of letters that my mother wrote home from college and graduate school and he hood for her Master's from Michigan. There were tons of old magazines including one called St. Nicholas, a children's magazine that lasted from the 19th century into the mid-point of the 20th century. One treasure we found was a couple of well used sets of Dickens. The families that owned them actually read those books - several times. I love Dickens and would spend a lot of time talking with one of my aunts about his literature.

One of my favorite stories about my family relates to my grandfather. He, like me, did not like people to choose clothes for him. He had a neighbor who thought she was a whiz at fashion and said "Mason, I have an idea for a tie that I am sure you will like. On Christmas day he opened the package and when he discovered what the neighbor had done he asked his driver to put the tie on and go over to the neighbor's house with a small gift of the season. At one point my mother came to my house and insisted, despite my protests to buy me a bathrobe, I said I don't like people to buy me clothes - please don't do that. When she did I sent it back to the store where she had purchased it. I then learned the story about my grandfather; I realized that some of what we see as personality traits are indeed inherited.

But today I learned another story I had learned about him was not true. One of the family legends about my grandfather was that he was kicked out of VMI for blowing up the guardhouse. Indeed, he did the latter but he actually moved from VMI to Columbia to follow his heart - his future wife was in New York and Columbia was a better place for him to court his future bride.

There are lots of things in the house and I hope that by the end of the weekend that we can get most of the house cleaning out done. I am less concerned about the physical objects but what I saw in the last few days is that some physical objects also create an emotional connection.