My younger son, who finished the Leaving Cert a few weeks ago, has been going through his room setting aside childish things. I see that his purge is overdue; there were games and toys that were almost already outgrown when we moved from England five years ago.
We should probably have been even more ruthless in packing, but as we understood the difference between the space we could afford in the English midlands and the space we could afford in Dublin, my husband and I discarded more than half our own possessions. (I acknowledge our good fortune in being able to afford any space at all in Dublin.) We couldn’t bear to ask the same of the children.
My son is thoughtful and knows that I think more nostalgically of his childhood than he does, full now of the joys of new adulthood. He set aside things he thought I’d want to keep. He was, of course, mostly right; our children know us well.
There was some furniture from the dolls’ house my grandfather had made for me 45 years ago. The house itself long gone to other lives, but a hand-carved wooden cradle to hold a baby the size of a grape endures, carried as a talisman of my grandfather’s love across decades and seas and borders.
There was a family of plastic squirrels with fluffy tails that will probably be on the planet centuries after humans have blown each other to oblivion. I don’t know what I was thinking when I bought them for his third birthday, except that my son would like them.
He did, carried them in dimpled fists and small pockets around the park and the shops, handed them to me for safekeeping while he climbed at the playground and fed the ducks. They are so small, surely no harm to keep them though they are neither useful nor beautiful, though space is tight and shipping costly.
Take a photo, I tell myself, let them go, but the idea of them lying in a bin – not even recyclable, not desirable second-hand – is too much.
And then – I know from the smell before I come to them – there is a box of 64 wax crayons, all more or less used, the pinks, purples and oranges more than the others, the greys and browns hardly at all. They’ve survived the years because they lived at my grandparents’ house, and my grandparents clove to order and neatness, stored things tidily arranged in their original packaging.
My brother and I had art supplies at home, in abundance, in constant use. There was a yellow plastic tub that had once held two litres of Neapolitan ice-cream, divided like a flag into thirds of vanilla, strawberry and chocolate, for years after holding handfuls of pencil crayons of different lengths and thicknesses and hardness, the leads broken and ends chewed.
It was practical enough. We drew daily, which was the point. In adult life I tend much more towards such contained chaos than towards my grandparents’ neatness, and my own kids’ crafting supplies lived in biscuit tins and shoeboxes. The tidiness was appealing because we loved our grandparents and that was how they were.
But because the crayons remained a set, remained in order, separate, they passed from me to my sons. Because I’d taken care of the box, they did, and so here it is, one of vanishingly few objects I can touch now that I touched in early childhood.
I look through them, read the names on the labels, the precursors of my adult fascination with the names of paint colours, with words for light. The colours are disordered, juxtaposed in ways I find ugly and I start to rearrange them, rediscover that the crayons I loved most of all are the least used because I saved them for best, for later, for special occasions that never came.
I still delight in rose pink and sunset orange and violet, glowing colours that I was taught “didn’t go” and couldn’t be worn together. I wear them now, on confident days. I glance down at my lined adult hands, at the scars on the fingers from cooking and rock-climbing and I see the rings that replace the beloved engagement ring I lost last year.
The stones I wear constantly now are purple, yellow, crimson and orange, my childhood self still almost in touching distance as my children’s childhoods fade.
