from 'Preservations'

Ugh, the days after New Year’s: a dismal, soulless chasm that marks the end of holiday cheer and the start of weeks when rooms painted white stay dark in direct sunlight. It’s a bleakness you can‘t rebuff by baking cookies or playing a CD of Schubert’s song cycle Die Winterreise, The Winter Journey.   

But Farrell tries. And now that the cookies are cooling on the counter and Schubert’s hero languishes in the snow, she slices open boxes that have been stacked in the bedroom, gathering dust, since she moved here last summer.

Each is a secular Ark of the Covenant, filled with items that for years have defined and comforted her through her wanderings in her personal desert: a shabby teddy bear. Family photos. High school yearbooks. Pressed roses from the bouquet a boy gave her for her recital. The cross from her mother’s casket. And more.

She’s kept all of it safe and dry, untorn and unbroken, free of spiders and teeny bugs that eat old things. But the time for reverence is over. She has no room for treasures stored in corrugated-cardboard vessels marked with a mover’s logo.

Everything goes into trash bags. She has no qualms. No second thoughts. No twinge of sentimentality. There’s no room for that, either.

Funny, the things we throw away: it’s not what we keep that says the most about us. It’s what we lose. 

NOTE: "Preservations" was originally titled "Mount Can't," but I thought I should change the title after friends in the UK said "can't" was too close to a notorious English word that begins with a "c." I wrote it under the name "Anne Arlington" because at the time I thought I would be writing only historical fiction and decided to use a separate name for non-historicals. The name is an inside joke on the romance writer pen name: the writer's middle name plus the street they grew up on. My middle name is Anne, and I grew up on Arlington Avenue. Ergo ... Anne Arlington.  As it turned out, this was the only time I used "Anne Arlington." And I sure haven't entertained notions of publishing anything else with "can't" in the title.