When bric-a-brac is so much more. Precious memories emerge during family cleanout
I was recalling in last week’s column the excitement I felt each time my late mother Harriet traded in one car for another.
Harriet was a naturalist. Her cars reflected a lifestyle devoted to mucking about in swamps, cruising back roads for bird sightings and grubbing in dirt for wild food most folks looked at as weeds.
Trading in a car meant she was obliged to clean out the current one, scraping layers of nature-related bric-a-brac from back seats, under seats and between them. Those assembled for this unearthing were never disappointed.
From the shadows during one trade-in, a paring knife emerged. She’d used it for cutting watermelon on hot summer field trips when the breeding bird atlas took all her time.
Then a camp ax appeared. A camp ax? Those assembled thought back fondly on Harriet’s ax phase — a skull collecting period when her car stopped at road-flattened creatures to assess their suitability for what was fast becoming an impressive collection of animal skulls.
Next to appear was a very old Peterson field guide. The first 30 pages had eroded away. Then came a lens cap, dusty and splotched with grape jelly. “Isn’t that Florence’s lens cap?” a birding friend asked.
Harriet and her best friend Florence had been birding by the river on a winter’s day several years prior. Out in the middle, a duck drifted by. It was not your average mallard, not a black duck nor common merganser. A ruddy duck, perhaps? The ladies’ pulses quickened. The duck was drifting away, though, slipping downstream.
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Quickly, Florence, your spotting scope! In the shuffle that followed, Florence’s lens cap went the way of so many small things: down between a crack in the seats.
Allowed to languish there, it wedged its way under a blanket, the one Harriet used when lying on her back fixing flat tires in the mud.
Harriet and Florence had some very good times in mud. On one — it was late autumn, all the warblers had gone — they got a flat in the boondocks and couldn’t get the lug nuts off. Harriet jumped on the tire iron, but the lugs wouldn’t budge. A nice young man in a pickup came by and helped out.
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Another time, they got mired in ooze on a backcountry road that seemed to be going somewhere but wasn’t.
Bogged down to the axles, the pair trudged 3 miles to a farm. The farmer was busy but promised to come when he could. The ladies could trust him, he added. He was Presbyterian.
Oh, the memories that emerged as my mother dug deeper. Each item brought back pages in a book of nature days.
Remember when Harriet hooted like a barred owl into pre-dawn darkness and the darned bird swooped in and nearly perched on her head?
Remember all those heron rookeries, and that snowy owl in a windswept horned lark field?
Keep on truckin’ mom. That’s what we told her. We'll dig out again about five years from now.
E-mail Rick at rmarsi@stny.rr.com
This article originally appeared on Binghamton Press & Sun-Bulletin: Outdoors columnist recalls precious memories of car cleanout
