Vanessa managed an answering smile.
“Thank you. The house looks lovely. It seems bigger somehow.
I’d always heard that things shrunk as you got older.”
Loretta turned off the radio.
Vanessa regretted the gesture, as it meant they were left with only
themselves to fill the silence.
“There were too many dark colors before,” Loretta told her.
“And too much heavy furniture.
At times I used to feel as though the furniture was lurking over me,
waiting to push me out of a room.”
She caught herself, uneasy and embarrassed.
Unfinished Business
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By Daniel Thornton - CeljeUploaded by sporti, CC BY 2.0,
https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=27075869
People get attached to their stuff. Two-year-olds, for instance, have verystrong opinions about what’s theirs (“MINE!”), and are suspicious about sharing, no matter what nonsense their adult caregivers spew about thiscaring thing. And although (most) people eventually learn to follow appropriate social norms, that relationship to stuff and things still matters throughout the life span, and even, in a way, beyond it — when you’re gone, after all, your loved ones will likely inherit your most prized possessions. If nothing else, at least your memory will live on through, say, a particularly nice set of dresser drawers you once owned.
People express their self-identity through their belongings, a notion that psychologists and neuroscientists are lately finding empirical evidence to support, though the idea itself is of course not a new one.
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When she was awake and wandering the apartment, she’d stop to touch
something—the back of a chair, the side of a table, the round dome of a
paperweight. She would think, Mine. My things, my apartment, my country.
Three Fates