Memory in Objects, in Places | Kate Forbes

A few years ago I was the last overnight visitor to a house that’d been in my family for a few hundred years… my relatives were born and died in those old beds, rooms. In the attic were trunks filled with old civil war uniforms, flapper dresses, old lace….. and the old house was rotting, sad… but I could still feel all the life that had happened there, when the world was a very different place. My aunt gave me many of the oil studies that my namesake, Katherine, painted in the 1880s; she also played the guitar, and died at my age, of T.B. I have her tambourine, her ornamental hair comb. I was the twelfth bride to wear the family dress, fifth generation. I love the funny old things I have from that house more than anything, they connect me to a past I was never part of, but is in my DNA, somewhere. It is so bitter, the reminder of mortality, of Time moving on… but comforting because I can lean against those who came before me.