They Left Us Everything: A Memoir
Language: English
Pages: 288
ISBN: 0399184090
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
A warm, heartfelt memoir of family, loss, and a house jam-packed with decades of goods and memories.
After almost twenty years of caring for elderly parents—first for their senile father, and then for their cantankerous ninety-three-year old mother—author Plum Johnson and her three younger brothers have finally fallen to their middle-aged knees with conflicted feelings of grief and relief. Now they must empty and sell the beloved family home, twenty-three rooms bulging with history, antiques, and oxygen tanks. Plum thought: How tough will that be? I know how to buy garbage bags.
But the task turns out to be much harder and more rewarding than she ever imagined. Items from childhood trigger difficult memories of her eccentric family growing up in the 1950s and ’60s, but unearthing new facts about her parents helps her reconcile those relationships, with a more accepting perspective about who they were and what they valued.
They Left Us Everything is a funny, touching memoir about the importance of preserving family history to make sense of the past, and nurturing family bonds to safeguard the future.
Roundabout at Bangalow: An Intimate Chronicle
Reader's Digest International (January 2015)
Her family adored her engaging personality; she was the baby who made everyone laugh. Her father owned a bank and her family owned multiple country homes to which all were invited during the long summer months. Securely surrounded by family and friends, she learned to be generous and inclusive: the world was her oyster. Mum wanted us to think the impossible, question authority, have open minds, and stretch our imaginations— to “go for it.” But Dad demanded that we stop daydreaming, obey
quoted Mum’s story about the little gold pennies Grandfather handed out to train conductors, and she’s found one in the pile of stuff she inherited. She encloses it for me in the envelope. I remember the lake stone Pelmo found. I am reaching for your hand … Please reach back. I take the penny out, thread it onto a gold chain, and wear it around my neck. Buried Treasure It is late April, almost three months since Mum died. The forsythia bushes are marking the transition from winter to spring.
toast in the kitchen before Robin gets in his car for his twelve-hour drive home. As he lugs his suitcase out the boathouse door, he tells me not to give away the garden bench—he’s made arrangements to donate it to the Oakville Museum. Then he spies Dad’s fire escape ladder—the fat coil of sisal rope I’ve put aside for the garbage—and he’s so viscerally affected that he heaves it onto the back seat of his Volvo. “I think I’ll rescue this,” he says. “Just a sec,” I say. “Let me take a picture of
jumpy, too. Now there’s a stray black cat on the verandah every morning. “Shoo! Scat!” But he remains poised on the top step, switching his tail, his eerie yellow eyes staring up at me. He claws at the screen door and scratches at the wicker chairs. Sometimes he slides in unnoticed and I’m startled by a streak of black in the upstairs hall. Mum and Dad hated cats because they stalked the birds, but this one seems to know something … I wonder what. The buyer keeps postponing the closing date and
the lawyer has explained that debts to Dad are not Mum’s to forgive—she inherited his assets, not his debts. Debts to Dad should be deducted from our inheritance and repaid to the estate. Not everyone is happy. Obviously, in hindsight, Mum was the better bank. Mum has also left each one of us a specific, treasured object. To me, she’s left the German music box that has been in her family since 1878. To Robin, she’s left the wooden prison ship, carved out of wood and fishbone by Dad’s