Carpe Glitter

by Cat Rambo

My great-grandfather had been a con man, always on the edge of getting run out of town, according to her stories. They’d had to leave in the middle of the night more than once, abandoning anything that couldn’t go into a suitcase. This could be a reaction to that.

“No!” I’d seen too many other people let a year turn into two, then three. Then never. There’s always something to eat away whatever funds you have. I had to grab the chance while I could. I’d watched the meager wage my mother made as a secretary in the years since my grandmother stopped subsidizing us melt away every month. Always something—a roof to be fixed, my mother’s ulcer operation, a thousand car problems.

getting part-time jobs, but never enough. Never money to put away for college.

Imagine all the detritus a person creates during a lifetime. I’m not talking about trash—food wrappers and old boxes—but objects that we interact with, that we make: grocery lists and summer postcards, books we scrawl notes in during school, journals and letters and drawings. And photographs. God, the photographs!

In the morning, we went into the big kitchen that Grandmother used. The one in the other house was small and cramped: she referred to it as “the party kitchen” despite the fact that she never, in all the time I knew her, held a party there.

The plants had an odd purplish hue and bore clusters of white flowers that opened only at sunset, filling the courtyard with an ineffable, sweet smell that to me will always be the smell of homesickness.

What was this house, if not a monument to held regrets? Glitter takes movement. By clutching it so hard, stuffing it into boxes, she’d taken away everything she loved about it.

Some of this sounds hyperbolic, or as though my mother was some Crawfordesque vision of rage.

She’d never be the first to yield in a battle with me. All her life, she’d had little control over things around her, and I’d been the first thing she’d had total, utter power over.

Keeping bits that reminded me of childhood, like the comforter. History of my own, not my mother’s or grandmother’s. They’d stay with me, those two, and I’d always feel sorrow at their absence, but not regret. Never regret. You can seize the glitter, but your hands have to be open, not holding onto things. Reaching forward.