Hello again. Let’s begin, dear readers, with a poem:
That delicious feeling
of floating above
of rising away from
and seeing this world
as only
what is
below.
– EJSH
My husband is 6 feet 3 inches tall.
We are a foot apart in height, which has delighted me since we met in 1997, when I was 20 years old.
One of the beautiful things about living your life in companionship with another person is that you get used to them. You accept them completely (hopefully), physically, mentally, emotionally and spiritually. It’s a lovely (and often maddening) process. This acceptance creates a solid foundation for long-lasting love.
Also, over those many years and decades, since you are so used to the other person, it’s easy not to truly see and appreciate what makes them special, and how that uniqueness gives them perspective.
Once in awhile over the years, while my husband and I are talking or kanoodling, I would climb up and stand on top of a chair, so we were eye-to-eye.
It seemed a funny, but effective, thing to do. I could see his hazel-green eyes better. And it was nice to throw my arms around his neck at his height. Kissing each other on level ground is satisfying.
After a couple of instances, I also started looking around while I was up there. And I realized, from up there, where he lives at 6 feet and 3 inches (4 inches with shoes), it’s a whole different world.
I began to not just accept his height, but also to comprehend how it gave him an entirely unique vantage point on life.
But it was more than that, too.
Many years into our marriage, I was going through a household purge phase. I was moving through each room, riding it of the detritus of accumulation. As I worked to clear cabinets and bookshelves, sideboards and side tables, I suddenly had the instinct to look up.
When I did, it was like a revelation. There at the top of every credenza and armoire in our home there were things.
Dusty things.
Things laid haphazardly.
Things I thought we had gotten rid of.
Things that I was sure I’d thrown away.
Unwanted things still in their Amazon boxes.
Finished puzzles we didn’t want to break up, old kites once flown when our children were much younger, a dusty, decorative sun umbrella from my brother’s sun-drenched wedding in Sonoma.
And many, many cowboy hats.
All of these things, stashed and stowed by the only person who could have possibly put them there.
Things I’d never really noticed before.
“Wait a minute!” I remember saying out loud.
Once I saw the things, my memory sprang to life, and I recalled the moments when my husband came home, chatting away, while I listened distractedly, or just appreciated that he was home, or finished getting dinner ready, I now remembered I had seen him place things up there.
These were his private little hiding spots. His personal overhead storage bins. His cubby holes. His out-of-the-way dude-stuff safe keepers in a house full of females.
His space, among the clouds of our home.
As so happens in marriage, it made me love him even more. And it made me crazy.
I didn’t demand he clear his stashes of stuff, but did initiate a little edit.
I like to tell this little anecdote among friends from time to time. It’s an amusing anecdote of marriage, of knowing someone and then suddenly discovering something new that’s been right in front of your eyes and hidden for years.
I also use this awareness when I get on a purge streak, always remembering to gaze upward to keep his high-elevation collections under control.
Recently, though, I noticed a new thing.
I was quietly working away one day on the couch when he came into the room. Not totally aware of my presence, he went to the top of the armoire, began sorting through some things up there just above his eye-level, found what he was looking for, removed it, and left.
I’ll admit: I didn’t realize he was actively using his overhead bins as dynamic high-shelf holding space. I thought he just put stuff up there and let them be for months or years at a time.
This little moment got me thinking.
About the high shelves in life.
Those far-off spaces where we stow and stash. The mostly out-of-sight spots where we put our stuff.
The stuff that has meaning to us, but maybe no one else.
The stuff we don’t know what to do with.
The stuff we will unpack later.
The stuff we want to avoid, but pick up again, at some future point.
The stuff that needs to stay safe.
What’s on my metaphorical high shelf? I wondered. What have I put up there?
Did I stash things I wanted to forget about? Or things I wanted to come back to?
I had a big closet as a child.
There were a lot of shelves inside that closet. The lower ones were chock-full of childhood picture books and paperbacks, art supplies, and construction paper. Crammed with toys and tea sets and Barbie dolls.
The things on the highest shelves were mine, too, but they were things my mother had elevated, putting them on the high shelf meant they were not to be touched.
Among them was a box of dolls I was allowed to play with only infrequently.
They were given to me by family members. One was a fancy porcelain doll, delicately painted, red-haired ringlets and dressed like an 1800s lady. She was obviously breakable. When her porcelain legs brushed together they made that sandy scrapping noise that made me cock my head and turn away. She was the kind of precious, untouchable gift that adults sometimes give to little girls for reasons that confound me.
The other was a sweet-faced doll of a nun.
I remember my mother taking her out once and telling me that this doll had been hers when she was a child. I didn’t have anything of my mother’s from when she was a child. Years later I would learn of her difficult, traumatic childhood, but then I was blissfully unaware. I remember how her voice changed and softened when she told me about the doll. The nun doll was not porcelain and breakable in the same way as the fancy doll, but when my mother gave me explicit, yet tentative, permission to play with it, I felt the honor of it.
I felt her letting it go a bit, and letting me into something I couldn’t name.
I loved dolls, and the way I could invent whole worlds around them. So I quickly put the nun doll into the world I had built for my Barbie’s.
The nun doll didn’t have quite as much ambulature as my Barbie’s did, however, and so when I tried to swivel her head around, I heard something inside her snap, her head lolling awkwardly to the side.
My stomach dropped.
I’d broken my mother’s nun doll. I was frozen with regret and shame.
I’d taken the thing on the high shelf and ruined it. I’d been given access to something precious I shouldn’t have.
Still, it was a doll and I was a kid, so I did what kids do. I stashed the doll away and hoped my mother would never find out.
Of course she uncovered the doll, buried in the recesses of my closet, at some point in the future.
I’ll never forget her exclamation: “Oh, Emily! You broke her!”
Tears welled up in my mother’s green eyes.
She got up and walked out of my room, the nun doll cradled in her arms. I felt horrible and so ashamed. It was the last time I ever saw the nun doll.
Years later, I had to clean out my mother’s closet after she died. In the back of my mind, I thought I might find the nun doll.
But I did not.
I wondered where the doll went and how deeply I had hurt my mother when I broke her. A shadow of the old shame remained, but there was also a curiosity. I wondered what the nun doll represented to my mother. I wondered what meaning she imbued into that doll, what memories were held within the long black and white habit she wore. I wondered why my mother had placed her on the high shelf – but more than that, I wondered what had possessed her to take her down and hand her precious thing over to me.
I’ll never know the full extent of that high-shelf story, but I know my mother dealt with the fear, trauma and pain of her childhood by placing a lot of it on a high shelf.
She worked through what she could – and to spare her children from experiencing a similar childhood, she consciously created a loving, safe, nurturing environment on the low, everyday shelves of our life.
At times, my husband gets annoyed with my purging of things. He’s not opposed to the removal process, but doesn’t like his high shelves disturbed by anyone else.
“Don’t worry about what’s up there,” he tells me.
And I try not to. I mostly don’t. Until they get overrun with clutter. Until then, I feel like the best course of action is to let his high shelves be.
The high shelves in our lives have a role.
They have a purpose, a meaning.
Just sitting there.
They can be havens for the pieces of who we were, talismans of who we hope to become again, or reminder tokens of the things that we want to move past, but also keep somewhat close.
There’s a time and space to re-examine them, bring them down and sit with them. Maybe there will be a time to test our own hearts by passing the high-shelf things onto more innocent hands.
And there’s also a time to let them rest, near and far at the same time, knowing they are a unique part of us, a safe place to stow some dusty parts, the gently almost-forgotten and still always present, pieces of our story, our souls.
Just lovely, Emily. And this, "they made that sandy scrapping noise that made me cock my head and turn away." fabulous. I could feel that. This piece got me thinking about my own high shelves and so many many things given away in a flurry of wanting to move on or clear out. Most of which I don't think about, but a few, well, a few linger in my memory and that in itself is a high shelf isn't it? ❤️
This resonates deeply