(excerpt from a work in progress) Anachronism

The sound of the humming tea kettle reminds her of W.’s apartment, when they would be going through his belongings while waiting for the water to boil.  W. will be moving from his house to a nursing home soon.  A stroke had struck him and left him feeble in mind and body- a loss of independence and appreciative thought.  After  a lengthy stay in the hospital, he’d had a pronounced loss of functioning especially in his thought.  

It annoyed her, the purging of his possessions that they were performing.  The apartment would not be able to store all the things that W. had in the house and possessions would have to be sorted and either handed out or kept, but Vi still loved going through W.’s things with him.  His life was a deep reservoir of experience, and his house was steeped in that history, a literal novel of meaning.  He lived in a state of anachronism too, with the mix of ancient things with current things.  Vi found his bathroom especially comical, with his newly acquired electric shaver with its robotic green eye charging as it sat on his bathroom shelf next to strange ointments in tiny corked glass bottles, their labels browned with age.   Working with W for the past three months, Vi had fallen in love with the house and its ambience of nostalgia.  She would stand in any room and sense all the colours, flavours and aromas of time, the time of W’s long and rich life.  So every closet was being opened, boxes brought out and their contents scrutinized.  W. had always been a meticulous person- one could see it in his mannerisms, his careful scrutiny of everything before him and the stacks and labels that went on every box, yet it was apparent that he had lost the thread of syntax with which he had arranged it all.



Yesterday, she had been going through boxes lifting objects and papers to bring to him for him to decide whether or not he would keep them or put them in another box to be given away.  Out of one box, she pulled out a piece of pottery that looked like it was from another world.  Vi held it in her hands for a few moments and immediately its beautiful designs and colours touched her.  It was a small globe with a spout at the top, with exotic curves upon it surface.  It looked iridescent, yet it was not, its colours only made it seem so.

“Oh, this is beautiful,” Vi said “Where did you get this?” She hands the piece over to W and he held it, looking it over with a look of consternation, as if trying to divine its name, rolling it around  by the tips of his fingers.

“Is this mine?”  he said. Vi laughed, but knew how saccharine her laughter was.

“I would hope it is.” She said.  W laughs with her, but his laugh too is short and distracted.  He is bent on determining meaning from the pottery piece she had put in his hands.  His face then lights up.

“It was my wife’s.   She brought it to me in the...”  his eyes looked into middle space as he paused to retrieve a word. “the plaza- not the plaza, I’m trying to say.”  He drops his hands into his lap with the pottery piece in it.  “Oh, what am I trying to say?”

It was like this for most everything they would look over.  he would hold them in his hands and  sometimes the osmosis of meaning would come to the object he is holding, but generally he would dismiss them, not knowing why he had kept them, not knowing why he would keep it now. Some of the things that Vi would bring to him would astound her with their historical significance and beauty and she felt deeply sad and powerless when she placed it in W’s hand and watched his brow wrinkle and his eyes narrow as he struggled to read this new artefact of his distant and ever falling past.  At times, W could relay a story about what he was holding in his hand, but his narrative would meander from tangent to tangent to the point where he would be completely lost , having forgotten what he was originally talking about, forgetting what he had started with.  He could never bring a date to the object he held, could never attach a timeframe to his stories, as if the memory hung in ether, like an apparition or a vapour. Vi would follow his narrative as well as she could, but would only frustrate herself with the lack of comprehension.  The story would end, unfinished like a trail overgrown in the woods.