Behind the Ironic Column

There’s no visible scar, just one of those mental glitches that encourages me to hang on to too many things.   I’ve mentioned before that I’m in a “clearing out” phase which isn’t going very quickly – but the goal is for those things to stay gone once I’ve discarded them. 

When I was about 12, I went through one of these stages, deciding to sort out my possessions and eliminate the ones I didn’t want any more.  There weren’t  that many since my younger brother had taken care of demolishing a great number of things.  I still remember the kid who recklessly smashed up my blue pedal car.  Not my brother but a friend of his.  That kid went on to become a criminal, which didn’t surprise me too much.  But that’s a different story.

Like many preteen girls, I liked horses and stories about them.  All those books about Black Beauty and Flicka and the TV shows.  Sometime in that period I acquired a small china figure of a black horse, rearing up on its hind legs.  I don’t remember that it was a present, which makes me think that I bought it myself with whatever allowance money I had.  And I’m sure it wasn’t valuable – certainly not if I bought it in the local 5&10.  There were some other figurines as well but the one I remember most is the horse.  They sat on a shelf near my bed.  I don’t remember why I decided the figurines were tiresome or just not interesting any more, but I put all of them in my trash basket and took the shelf space for something else.  No idea what took their place but it was probably books. 

Sometime the next day my mother happened to be emptying trash and noticed them.  They promptly came out of the trash.  She said I couldn’t possibly have meant to just throw them away.  I said I did mean to.  I won the argument (they didn’t immediately go back on my shelf) but she won the war.  She put them in another room for a while, but the next time we moved that horse ended up in my room.  I couldn’t seem to get rid of it.  And I didn’t even read horse stories any more.   I eventually went away to school and the horse migrated in to live with my mother’s other figurines.  Twenty years after I first tried to dispose of it, it was still there. 

Would I have missed it if she’d let me throw it away?  Maybe, but I doubt it.  I remember it because I tried to discard it and was told not to.  And I think about it now when I hesitate over clearing something out – maybe I still expect somebody to be looking over my shoulder, telling me I shouldn’t get rid of these things.

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