Adult Short Story - First Place - Betty Tomlinson Anderson Award for Literary Excellence

Vicki's americano has congealing pools of cream across its surface when she glances at it. How long since she's had a sip? Drawn into expanding and contracting time tunnels that have sucked her deep into the past with each item she's handled and then hurled her spinning back into this uphostered green armchair in the corner of her dining room, she's disoriented and exhausted already. And not through her first coffee yet.

A tower of storage bins, felted with grey basement "fur" rises beside her. The contents wait for a turn to slingshot her, item by precious item, through her mind's eye into whole decades of her past and cause spikes of momentary remembered joy or shudders pricked alight of years of struggle and desperation. These course through her unbidden.

The university sweatshirt she gifted her dad fifty years ago when she was the first to even finish high school. How strange that this is one of the only things she's still got of his. The shredded remains of her youngest's beloved "blankie": a family legend of loved-to-deathness brings a smile and a chuckle as she hold its tangled mass up and cries, "blankie!" Then the miraculously intact intricate wool layette of her own birth story singularly holding a fragile connection not
ever likely to be forged. And under that, two lovingly-knitted toddler sweaters made by grandma in her prime, who now doesn't recognize her needles. On and on: tokens of love and connection jumbled together, distilled and preserved in just this one box. She definitely needs another coffee.

While the kettle rumbles to a boil, Vicki considers the conundrum these periodic purgings bring to a head, at "king tide" moments when the basement is so full no one can stand it anymore. The accumulated accumulations demand answer after definitive answer to the question,"Keep? give away? pitch?" It's excruciating and unavoidable if they're not to drown in it all. Every object a new battle between sentimental hoarding and the practical freedom space will bring. Beneath the
whole process lurks the deeper question, "Does any of it matter in the end?"

On the PBS documentaries Vicki likes, archeologists excitedly unearth filigree Viking cloak pins and long-buried-beneath-fields roman mosaic floors and profess their profound thrill at being the first in centuries to see these objects made and owned by people long, long dead . Why? Vicki wonders. What in the end can the artifact mean beyond blind chance that it survived and was
found by someone who cared to wonder whose it was and what it meant to them? All we learn over and forever is that a person in the past had nice things and that people still like nice things now.

Returning to her easychair perch, fresh coffee in hand, Vicki surveys the tower and asks it, " If I died tomorrow would the kids save any of this? I haven't told them stories to imbue any of it with meaning beyond my own heart's secret life. Why not pitch it all now? burn it in the backyard firepit and be done?" Wouldn't all that space be lovely? She's both tempted and horrified by the thought.

Buddhist ceremonial sand paintings are meticulously created over days expressly to be then destroyed and heaped carefully back into multicoloured piles of dust. Fleeting beauty is the point. West Coast First Nations' memorial poles are carved, painted, erected and honoured but then expected to slowly decay and return to the earth in centuries-long circles of transformation
unending. But the stories of ancestors and images of gods and demons repeat and persist. And maybe as well, a grandchild also kept his pappa's favourite pipe long after he was gone, or a granddaughter cherished making soup just as her grandma had taught her using her special pot, and special spoon. Humans love beautiful things and things that remind them of beautiful people.

So, until she's dead, some of this stuff will matter to Vicki. She won't deny herself the talismanic wonder unleashed by holding these three ceramic beads found on a beach and strung on braided cotton thread. Voices of long lost lovers, scents and sounds of places she'll never see again tumble across her heart like a broken necklace's pearls skittering across a polished floor, glinting
in the afternoon sun through an open window. Here and not here. Her many selves, like russian dolls nestled one inside the other: at once all different and all her.

And so on to the next box, because space must be made. On with winnowing the lesser, weaker connections—like the evaporating stage of maple syrup making—to keep, for now, what still she cannot do without. While she still has a basement, while the kids will still bring up the boxes, while she still remembers why these things matter. But unless she starts telling their stories,
unless she finds that "one kid" in the next generation who cares about the magic that can be in a thing, none of it will matter when she's gone. There will be wailing, " she left us everything!" and fires will be lit.