“Childhood scenes rushed back at me out of the night, strangely close and urgent. Today I know that such memories are the key not to the past, but to the future. I know that the experiences of our lives, when we let God use them, become the mysterious and perfect preparation for the work He will give us to do.” – Corrie Ten Boom, The Hiding Place
It’s Wednesday night, and I am leaving home on Saturday morning. I planned a big farewell party for myself so this week would lead up to a celebration instead of a loss. It is working.
I am sitting alone in the dining room of my sleeping house. All of the belongings coming with me to Connecticut are piled high all around me. Although I have ruthlessly pared down to the bare necessities, the amount of material I must haul across the country is daunting. How will it furnish an entire new life on an opposite shore?
This week I believe I gave away a solid third of my clothes. As I started packing, there were relics from a past life that didn’t seem to have a place in the new chapter. I found the white linen shirt I wore on my first real date. I was fifteen, and my beau took me downtown LA to the California Club for dinner. The shirt had bows on the shoulders; I had purchased it because of the photos I’d seen of my mother on her honeymoon wearing a white shirt with bows on the shoulders. I tried it on. I remembered the intensity of that evening, so in love with my date I could barely breathe as we sat on a terrace shadowed by the beautiful Los Angeles Public Library. There were potted palms around our table and a classical guitarist played in the corner. The memory filled me with remembered love, and I gave the linen shirt away.
Likewise with a white cotton skirt I purchased at age sixteen in an open-air market in the south of France. I was with my dear friend Margaux. The trip came at the end of a painful and miserable academic year I spent in northwestern France, and the purchase marked the return of sunshine and laughter to my life. It also commemorated the advent of my independence – I could travel across foreign countries alone, speak the local language, transact with currency I had earned myself, and make decisions about my wardrobe without consulting anyone. I wore the skirt on walks through Provencal towns and while I read Somerset Maugham on the Mediterranean shore at L’Hôtel Belles Rives on the Cap D’Antibes. F. Scott Fitzgerald lived in that hotel while he wrote Tender is the Night. I remember sitting at the end of the dock alone with a glass of sherry I’d charged to my room while an enormous moon filled the black bay with scintillating light. The water was luminous with pale, cool wonder, and I gazed upon it as if it was all a giant platter being offered to me so I could pick my adventure. The whole world flashed and danced before me on that Mediterranean bay and every inch of it seemed utterly available to me.
Next went a thick wooly grey skirt I’d purchased in a little shop in Vienna at age nineteen. I badly wanted to see Vienna at Christmastime, so during my year abroad in Italy I stopped there for a few days before flying home to spend the holidays with my family in California. The weather was absolutely terrible and freezing – but oh what a pleasure to keep warm in a city designed to let one do so in such gilded luxury. With my friend Lauren I raced over a mile through a slushy blizzard to see Sigmund Freud’s apartment before it closed, wet snow driven sideways into my inadequate clothing as we got lost and more lost. We made it at last, and after the odd tour through the odd doctor’s dwelling decided to spend our evening at the Sacher Hotel sipping muddy coffee and indulging in the famous chocolate torte. I decided the days of a student’s standard for travel attire were over. I saw the skirt in a window, bought it, and contemplated the importance of my life’s aesthetic while I ate my torte. If I desired beauty, then for beauty I would labor.
I also discarded a red and blue skirt I wore on a tour of Morocco with my brother at age twenty-one, my first real rough-and-tumble jaunt through a really foreign land. I wore it while the locals gawked and snickered at us when we were served sheep’s brains and when a monkey climbed up my body while I was buying spices for my mother. I discarded some kakhis I pulled out of the end-of-the-term Goodwill box in my boarding school dormitory, an old boyfriend’s lacrosse shorts, the first designer dress I bought in Paris.
I have continued to dig and pack and give away. In the course of this personal archaeology, this move seems to be as much about the past as it is about the future. These items are monuments to the instances of great change in my life, and they have had their time. As I sort my things, I am breathless to find over and over again the same thing: I have gotten what I wanted. I sought adventure and romance and I have gotten it. I have ached for understanding and scraped away at hard fact to find real Truth. I have left and I have returned, I have gotten together and broken up.
At age twenty-five, I feel I am just reaching a critical mass of memories to begin proving that God’s promises are, in fact, true. As memories continue to race through my mind, I understand that they are not being sent to me by mere Nostalgia, but by Hope itself – that I might be buoyed up into a more stately mansion by the goodness they prove.
