Season 2, episode 13: unpacking boxes //
Thursday, December 17, 2020

This is Shelter in Place, a podcast about coming together in a world that pulls us apart. From Oakland, California to Hamilton, Massachusetts, I’m Laura Joyce Davis.

--

I got the news just two months after we moved to Oakland. It was October 2004. I was walking out of my graduate school writing workshop when I flipped open my phone and saw the voicemail alert. I still remember the too-strong smell of Eucalyptus coming in through the open windows as I put the phone to my ear, the chatter of the classmates who were not yet friends, the way the setting sun took all of the heat out of the day, how the cold air blew in

I tried to hold it together as I walked out into the hall of that beautiful old building that looked more like an overgrown house than an academic institution. I could feel my classmates around me, my teacher walking behind me. I was in awe of her, and a little afraid of her, too. I didn’t want any of them to see me cry.

If you listened through season one, then you might remember that teacher. I spoke with Micheline Aharonian Marcom in episode 84, the Capacity for Courage. I’m no longer afraid of Micheline, probably at least in part because of our conversation that day. She saw my face and asked me what was wrong. When I told her that my grandpa had just died almost exactly a year after my grandma, her voice softened. She told me about how she still missed her own grandparents, how their legacy lived on in her stories. I’d been writing fiction inspired by my grandparents for years at that point. I would go on to write about them much more. 

That weekend, my husband Nate and I flew to Nebraska, where the entire extended family gathered for the funeral. We spent the remainder of the weekend cleaning out the farmhouse where my grandparents spent most of their life, where my dad and aunt grew up, where all of us grandkids spent so many summers and holidays. 

My memories of that house are all in soft focus, tinged with nostalgia. The small kitchen at the center of the house was a place of happy smells and favorite foods. The red and white checked plastic tablecloth was the showcase for perfectly cooked strips of bacon and eggs fried in the bubbling grease--the way I still cook them to this day. There was the metal dish on the stovetop that kept the blueberry muffins from getting cold. The jar of Brachs hard candies on the counter next to the clunky black rotary phone.

In my memory that kitchen was always warm, and the people there were always glad to see me.

It was where we’d make sugar cookies from scratch by the hundreds, never realizing that my grandma would stay up until 1 a.m. decorating them long after we’d grown tired of the task and gone to bed. The farm was where I learned to drive a tractor and a truck, where I gathered buckets of raspberries and eggs from the chicken coop, where I helped my grandpa check the irrigation and feed the cattle. I can’t remember ever being bored. Only once, when I shut myself in the bathroom with a pillow case knapsack tied to a stick, ready to climb out the window, can I remember feeling truly unhappy. I remember also how my grandma sat on the toilet seat with me on her lap and told me the story of how she too had once tried to run away as a child when she was as mad at her brother as I was at mine. 

When we stepped into their house the weekend of the funeral, it was the first time I’d been there in many years. My grandparents had finally stopped farming in their seventies and went to live with my parents the last few years of their life. The house hadn’t been lived in for a while, and now even the bones of the house felt cold. I hoped that going through my grandparents’ things would bring back some of that old magic, that maybe I’d find traces of memories in the dust we brushed off boxes in the attic and basement. 

My grandparents lived through the Great Depression, so like most people of their generation, they kept everything. Balls of string. Old cassette tapes. Outdated calendars from the local bank. It was fun at first, sorting through all of those knick knacks that reminded us of them. We unearthed tinker toys and Lincoln logs, sugar confection cake toppers hidden in paper napkins, the boxes of plastic farm animals and fences so plentiful that as kids we’d set up corals and pastures that stretched across the entire living room floor. 

But the partially finished cement basement where we worked under the light of a single hanging bulb was chilly. Outside the wind howled and the sun never broke through the gray sky. There were more boxes than we’d realized, and also cluttered drawers, a moldy chest freezer that smelled of forgotten food and abandonment.

Most of the stuff we sorted through had no sentimental or monetary value, and it was hard to know why they kept them in the first place. Maybe it had been simpler to box things up and put them out of sight instead of making a decision about whether they deserved to stay or go.

Maybe they thought there might come a time when they’d need bags of seashells or twist ties or twenty-year old telephone books. Nate constructed a large ball from all of the rubber bands we found lingering on countertops and in the corners of drawers. 

All of my life I had loved that house, but as we unearthed item after item, I realized that it wasn’t the house I loved, or the things in it, but the people who gave it warmth and life. Without them it was just a building.

A few hours in, we were all exhausted. There was no clear guide for who should get the few things we all wanted, or what to do if we disagreed about what to keep and what to give away.

Underneath that question was a thornier one: What if the things that were important to my grandparents weren’t important to us? If we got rid of the things they cared about, were we in some way getting rid of them?

The only physical object I still have from that visit to the farm is a red handkerchief my grandma used to tie around her hair after she’d pinned her curls to her scalp. My grandparents were lifelong farmers in Plainview, Nebraska, a town of 1200 people. They were not wealthy or successful or famous. Their life was small, just the farm, family, and a quiet, enduring faith that carried them through some hard times. 

But the legacy they left behind was large. If I could make material the emotional inheritance they passed on, there would be boxes and boxes to unpack and uncover.

My grandma imparted to me the importance of making others feel loved through food. I can trace my love for cooking from scratch back to my grandma’s Betty Crocker cookbook, with its floured and sugared pages folded and peeling from decades of use. I inherited my dogged determination and work ethic from my grandpa, and can see its line extending down through my dad, who all my life has gotten up at 5 a.m., a habit he says he formed when he was six years old and the cows needed milking. I used to think my dad was crazy for getting up so early--but lately I’ve found myself doing the same thing.

I learned about love from them, too. Even in their eighties my grandparents could be caught sitting on the couch together holding hands or giggling. My grandpa told me often that my grandma was the prettiest girl he’d ever known. “Still is,” he’d say, and my grandma would actually blush. 

When I got married seventeen years ago, I brought that vision to my own marriage. We were living in Minneapolis then, and we spent a lot of time with my grandparents, who by that time were living with my parents. We were there when my grandma died, and in the long lonely year when my grandpa grieved her. We’d seen up close how sweet they were with each other, how they were in love with each other to the very end.

But over the years the goal of emulating that marriage has sometimes felt like a weight. As we’ve worked through the challenges of parenting and work and the monotony of everyday life, Nate has often felt frustrated by my idealized version of the past. I had no idea how hard marriage would be because while my grandparents were extremely hard workers, marriage was one thing that--at least from my perspective--seemed effortless. 

When we opened boxes and cleaned out dressers and drawers after my grandpa’s funeral, I think I hoped I’d find treasure, journals or love letters, maybe, some secret to how they created that marriage I admired and longed for. But the things we uncovered didn’t unlock any secrets. They just reminded us of how much work there was to be done.

We’ve been calling this season Pandemic Odyssey because it’s followed the story of our family’s journey from one side of this divided country to the other. If you’d like to hear that story, I suggest going back to the season 2 prologue and listening from the beginning.

In Homer’s Odyssey, early on in their journey Odysseus and his crew spend a month with Aeolus, ruler of the winds. When they finally say goodbye, Aeolus gives Odysseus a strange and wonderful gift: an ox-hide bag containing all of the winds but the west wind, the one that will bring them back to Ithaca. And it works--until Odysseus’s men become convinced that the bag contains not wind, but treasure. With Ithaca in sight, they open the bag and the winds escape with such force that they’re blown all the way back to Aeolus’s island. This time around he wants nothing to do with them. 

As Nate and I have unpacked the boxes of our emotional inheritances, at times it’s been a bit like releasing those winds. We expect to find treasure, but those boxes don’t contain what we thought they would. Sometimes it seems like we’re moving backward.

Just as my memories of my grandparents’ house had no clutter on the countertops or the junk stashed in drawers, I didn’t see my grandparents’ relational challenges up close.

There were no sticky spills hardened underneath refrigerators or moth holes in the clothes. I don’t know what their marriage looked like when they lost a child, or when my grandma got the news that her brother’s plane was lost at sea, never to be recovered. I don’t know how they handled poverty, or parenting challenges, or the farm accidents that almost killed my grandpa on multiple occasions. Their relationship had always seemed as perfect as those confection sugar cake toppers my grandma kept unused in her drawers. 

My rosy memory is just one shade of the past. I still believe they had a great marriage, but I don’t know how they did it. Maybe they really were as good and kind as I remember them, or maybe they just expected less of each other. Maybe they were conflict-avoiders who kept their messier emotions boxed up and out of sight. Maybe over the years they’d learned to praise and forgive each other more quickly, to turn a blind eye to the things that annoyed them about each other. Maybe what I saw as easy was the result of many years of hard work, the masterpiece that emerged after decades of being sanded down and chiseled by life’s trials. 

When someone dies, we’re forced to unpack all of the boxes they left behind, to clean up the forgotten spills and air out the damp, moldy places. But we rarely take the same care with the emotional inheritances that are passed down. It’s not easy, holding up to the light the less favorable or more challenging parts of ourselves. It’s simpler to box them up and pass them onto the next generation. 

This isn’t only true of families. Countries often do the same thing. I’m grateful for the privileges and freedoms I’ve inherited as an American. People from all over the world come here for the opportunities our country promises. But while it’s more pleasant to focus on the things we’re proud of, our avoidance doesn’t do anything to unpack those musty old boxes we’d rather not look at. Opening them and sorting through their contents would force us to ask some difficult questions: Statues of Confederate Civil War Heroes--keep or toss? That clause in the Declaration of Independence that calls Native Americans “merciless savages”--keep or toss? The second amendment that was written at a time when automatic weapons with 50-round clips didn’t exist--keep or toss? Immigration laws that make it nearly impossible for innocent people to escape deadly situations and find asylum on our shores--keep or toss?

Whether we’re talking about old boxes in the basement or systemic racism, it often takes someone dying to make us finally ask those questions. Maybe underneath our reluctance is the fear that if we get rid of the things that have defined us for so long, we’ll lose our identity. We’ll distance ourselves from the good parts of our past. In my own life, the most painful boxes to unpack are the ones that force me to admit that the things that are important to me are not always the same things that were important to my ancestors.

We’ve talked a lot about the importance of sorting through our country’s emotional inheritance in Shelter in Place. In season two we’ve heard echoes of that sentiment from a poet, a physician, a theologian, a journalist, and an educator. In season 1 we heard it from Air Force veteran Tino Dinh, from the women who wrote the anthology FIERCE, from the Navajo Nation artist Elmer Yazzi. As Mark Charles said in season one, episode 72, we need to have a common memory. If we never clean out the basement of our emotional inheritance and talk about what to keep or toss, we’re doomed to repeat the mistakes of the past, or view it in an overly simplistic or idealized way that hurts those around us.

Just as those boxes we went through in my grandparents’ basement were a mixture of things we prized and things that shouldn’t have been kept in the first place, our emotional inheritances are often complicated, and take time to sort out. The work ethic handed down to me from my grandparents is a great gift--but it’s also why I tend toward workaholism, why even on the weekends I often feel guilty when I’m not working, why taking a Sabbath is sometimes hard. I learned these values from my grandparents first; the work of a farm never stops, and even if it could, there are children to tend to, dinners to cook, vegetables to can. They didn’t stop farming until they were in their seventies. Even that tender memory of my grandma frosting cookies is proof of that. 

It’s hard work to sort through those boxes, and it can get touchy fast. We don’t always agree about what we should keep or what we should toss. Unpacking the boxes is only productive when everyone agrees that the relationships between the people sorting them are more important than who gets what. If there’s an absence of trust, or a deep-seated belief that the other parties are operating not out of generosity but greed, that our siblings or parents are secretly out to get the best heirlooms, then we come to the process with an antagonistic spirit, and opening up those old boxes can be a lot like releasing that bag of winds. The contents can send us crashing back to the places we thought we’d left behind, reverting to some former, less mature version of ourselves. 

Whether we are talking about families or countries, we can only sort through our inheritances well if we agree from the start that the goal isn’t acquiring more stuff, but together deciding what we’ll pass onto the next generation, and how to fit into our lives the things we decide to keep. Sometimes it might mean getting rid of the stuff that we’ve held onto because it’s familiar, but that isn’t actually serving us well anymore because our environment has changed. 

There have been a couple of practices that have helped Nate and me sort through our own emotional inheritances. The first is an exercise we learned years ago from Jerry Mabe, the founder of Right Path, the most comprehensive and helpful personality and career assessment I’ve ever taken. I can’t remember anymore what Jerry calls it, but we call it the Wheel of Life. 

We start with a blank page and a small circle in the middle of the page. Then we draw lines going out from the center, like spokes on a bicycle wheel. Each line represents a broad category of life: work, family, spirituality, physical health, intellectual satisfaction, finances. Over the years we’ve added a couple of other lines, one for kids, one for our marriage. Then we rate each category with 1 in the middle and 10 at the outer edges of the wheel, to indicate how poorly or well life is going in that particular area. Finally we connect the dots, and show each other our wheels. In an instant we’re able to see where life is out of balance, where the wheel is round and where it’s dented. It’s fascinating to see those wheels of life change year after year, and encouraging to see that change is actually possible, and also that perfect balance probably isn’t--but that doesn’t mean we should stop trying. 

We’ve done the wheel of life many times for ourselves, but recently we did it for our families of origin, and the new angle was surprisingly illuminating. There were things we’d inherited without realizing it, places where our wheels didn’t match up with the ones from our families. Over the years the wheel of life has given us a vocabulary to talk about family values. It’s helped us to unpack our emotional inheritances, to decide which things we want to hold onto, and which ones we want to leave behind. It isn’t always a matter of good or bad; often the things we leave behind don’t make sense for us in the way that they did for our ancestors. We’re different people with different values. We live in a world that has changed a lot since those boxes were packed in the first place. 

In many areas of life, we have annual practices that help us unpack our boxes and reevaluate what to keep and what to toss. Businesses have audits. Sports teams have off seasons and training plans. Our country has the State of the Union address. Churches and schools have training days or retreats. But most of us don’t apply that same sense of ritual or ceremony to running our communities or families. 

The year we were married, we inherited a practice from Jim and Linda Bast, some friends of my parents. We call it the marriage retreat, which makes it sound more official than it is. I don’t actually know what Jim and Linda did on their marriage retreat, though I have a foggy memory of an email exchange with Linda many years ago where she gave me a few suggestions that spawned what we do today. 

We farm our kids out to friends or family, and do a staycation for a long weekend--four days if we can manage it. It’s our way of going through all of those boxes, asking which things we need to get rid of and what we should keep. And while we do make sure to have some fun together during that time, to remember that we like each other, it’s a lot of hard work. It’s not a vacation. It’s our annual audit, our state of the union address. 

But because we’ve been doing it year after year for seventeen years, the work isn’t quite as hard as it used to be. We’re no longer starting from scratch each time, so the work feels more manageable. That process of going through boxes year after year has brought us closer. It reminds us that we’re on the same team, it sets the intention for the year. Even though it’s work, it’s become a tradition that we look forward to, because it reminds us we’re on the same team and helps us set the intention for the year. 

If you’ve been listening, then you know that all of these intentional conversations have not made us the perfect family or even the perfect couple. Our family abruptly left our home in Oakland in September and set out on a pandemic Odyssey across the country in part because of how imbalanced our life had become. There were lots of dents in our wheels. We’d lost all sense of margin. We were struggling. We temporarily moved closer to family because we needed to reevaluate and try to slowly work our way back to the vision we’d had for our family when 2020 began--a vision that very quickly got disrupted with the pandemic. When we made that decision, we were forced to evaluate all of our physical objects very quickly and pack only what we could fit in one minivan and a small roof top carrier. We’re still going through our emotional boxes now, trying to figure out what parts of our old life in California we should keep and what parts we should let go. 

Whether we’re talking about physical or emotional boxes, it’s a lot easier to pay for mini storage or leave them for the next generation to deal with. It takes work to sort through them. Maybe you’ve avoided some of your own boxes this year as you’ve pulled boxes of lights or Christmas decorations from the basement or attic. 

But I wonder how both our personal relationships and our country might look different if instead of waiting for someone to die so we’re forced to deal with our emotional boxes, we figured out a way to sort through them together, remembering that the relationship is more important than what we keep or toss, that there are still shared values that bring us together, that could set the intention for the year to come. 

I’m deeply grateful both to my grandparents and to the Basts for reminding us that unpacking those boxes is a worthwhile endeavor.

I’ve been ending each episode of season two with an invitation. The holidays are often a time that reminds us of the boxes we’ve inherited from our families, some of which we’d rather not deal with. So today my invitation is this:don’t wait for someone to die before you unpack and sort through your boxes. 

Many of us aren’t getting to do our usual traditions this year. I don't know if Nate and I will get to do our marriage retreat this year. But whether you’re living alone or surrounded by family, I want to invite you today to take stock of the things you’ve been keeping in boxes. 

Maybe the easiest way to start to look at the physical objects around you, to see if there is anything you’ve been holding onto not because it’s meaningful, but because it’s easier not to deal with it. See if something in your home that might bless someone else if you gave it away. 

And then do the wheel of life, first for yourself, and then for your family of origin. Sign up for our newsletter and we’ll send you a printable copy of it, or check out our post of it today on Instagram at the handle @shelterinplacepodcast. If you’re able to do thes exercise with someone close to you, notice where your perceptions of the same spokes differ, where the spokes are bent. It can tell you a lot about the places where you need resolution. Celebrate the things that are going well. If your family members are still alive, thank them for the emotional inheritances you treasure. Remember that the goal isn’t to criticize the past, but to live better in the future. Maybe you can even find your way to asking the same questions for our country. 

I’m still writing about my grandparents today. They’re the harbor I keep coming back to in between everything else I write. There’s a lot that they’ve given me that I’m holding onto. Nearly twenty years later I still think of them often, still miss them. 

One of my favorite memories of my grandpa was a few months before he died, when Nate and I were still living in Minnesota, and taking care of him on a weekend when my parents were out of town. I was helping him get ready for bed, and the final task I had to do was rub lotion on his cracked feet.

My grandpa’s body was marked by his life. One arm was unnaturally bent from the accident that nearly cost him his arm. He was short, but his chest was thick and he breathed in ragged, ephezimic wheezes from years of inhaling dust and smoking cigarettes in his youth. He had thick black glasses and dark, sharp features, a square jaw that was always set. His hands were rough like sandpaper, and after he left the farm he never seemed to know what to do with them. The cracks in his feet were so painfully dry and deep that we would slather them with lotion and then cover them with socks for the night. 

The lanolin in the lotion had a thick, unpleasant smell that still makes me think of my grandpa whenever I smell it today. He sat on the edge of the bed waiting to be done with this thing that he needed, but that was strange for us both. Afterward I sat beside him on the bed and said something to the effect of how I knew that it was a little awkward to have me help him with things he used to be able to do himself. My grandpa could be gruff and prickly sometimes, but he also had a laugh that shook his barrelled chest, that let the tension out of the room. Those months after my grandma died he seemed to me always on the edge of tears or riotous laughter. Sometimes it was both. 

“We’ve had some good times together, haven’t we,” he said, laughter erupting from his lips. I laughed with him, and my heart was full. As I left the room, there were tears on both of our faces. We didn’t try to hide them.

As always, if you listen to the very end of the episode, you’ll hear Shelter in Place outtakes, a little something to make you laugh. But first I want to thank a few of our supporters.

Melissa Choi, thank you for supporting and encouraging us during a turbulent time in our pandemic Odyssey! We were wondering if we were crazy to keep doing this work -- and crazier still to leave home and set out across the country. It’s listeners like you who make this work worthwhile, and your support has reminded us that our community is growing, that we all play a key role in helping to create a space that can feel like home. 

Ed and Janie Riddiough, you were among the first people who welcomed us to Oakland all of those years ago, and even in different houses and cities, you’ve always made us feel at home. Thank you for providing shelter and comfort to our family in times of need, for encouraging us when we needed it most, and for being the kinds of friends who over the years have helped us unpack all kinds of boxes. We’re so grateful for your continued friendship and support.

If Shelter in Place has been a home for you in 2020, we hope you’ll take a moment to rate it on Apple Podcasts so others can find us. Shelter in Place is listener-supported, and we’d be grateful if you’d consider giving a year-end gift or becoming a regular supporter. You can learn more about that at our website, shelterinplacepodcast.info, where you can also sign up to receive the wheel of life, but the twelve days of delight we’ll be sending to your inbox over the holidays. 

And now if you’re still listening, here’s a little outtake.