Artifacts on the journey

In Joan Didion’s “Where I Was From,” a great read re California and the West, she writes of the 19^th century journey into the promised land, its myths and realities, and notes the precious artifacts, the family relics carried West, then abruptly abandoned along the way, thrown to the side in the rush to climb the Sierra mountains before snowfall, and possible death.

“Women who believed they could keep some token of their mother’s house (the rosewood chest, the flat silver) learned to jettison memory and keep moving.

Sentiment, like grief and dissent, cost time.  A hesitation, a moment spent looking back, and the grail was forfeited.”

Our family made, postwar, a very different journey from our native England – by ocean liner and train rather than oxen and wagon – but we also carried with us artifacts of the life before, relics that, too, are mostly vanished, abandoned or lost somewhere – now just memories kept inside.

That running cup my grandfather won at Wadham College, Oxford; the wood and glass bookshelf he took there; the stuffed alligator he kept above the stair landing in Rottingdean; my “Just William” books, early reading adventures -  all gone, lost, or forgotten gathering dust in a storeroom seldom seen.

In the arc of life, in the long journey, what do we keep?  What is important?  What precious objects remind us of the road traveled?  Who will care about them when our own time is done?

Reading provokes memories, questions……