The Book of the City of Ghost Cats

In the process of paring down and packing, we’re now starting to think about art. Mainly, shipping art to England.

Today’s a day of handling fragile things. Bubble wrap has arrived to cradle the breakables in their voyage. To shuffle eastward, buffered against any bumps or lumps that might befall them, over the fish and the whales and the very salt of the sea. You can’t put just any old anything on such a journey. Wouldn’t be fair.

First, I see the vases taken from my mother’s house – Polish pottery, I think. Little bud vases in white and cobalt blue. Is this the thing that will tell me on some gray Yorkshire morning that the world carries on? That the beauty she saw can be the same beauty I see? We can be linked by possessions, our thoughts of possessions, as much as by blood?

There’s a lopsided, illuminated map of Middle-Earth. A delicate, handmade soap dish marked with ladybugs. A single teacup that read Paris that I liked mainly for the clicking noise it made on its saucer. A small stack of framed art collected over years, nothing incredibly valuable, but all of it sings with meaning. All of it knocked me over with significance at one point. Now, some of them do little more than nudge, but still…a past version of myself believed they were worth money, keeping and framing.

The questions are kinda heavy, but they’re woven throughout this process. They *are* the process. Who are we without our things? And if I am what I’ve collected, what I’ve held onto through move after move, year after year, what am I?

There’s boxes of filled with scraps intended for a scrapbook. Tickets to my first Shakespeare play at the Colorado Shakespeare Festival, my first trip to the Renaissance Faire, a newspaper article I wrote in high school bemoaning the popularity of country music. It ought to be the definition of ephemera: things that exist or are used or enjoyed for only a short time. Now I wonder why does it have such a hold on me?

Did I want them for any other reason than this: evidence of change? Proof of life?

And then, the ashes themselves. Body and being of my parents, now powder on the bookshelf. The most fragile thing has changed into something invulnerable, permanent, devoid of risk. If it sounds bleak, I don’t mean it like that. We’ve said amongst ourselves that there is some grace in the hardest thing being over. The worry being done. Whatever sort of conquereror’s glory that disease can seek, it could not claim it ever again. It is an incredible gift to hold them now, safe and sound.

If my parents had not passed away last year, this transformation, this shedding and shipping of fragility would never have happened. I am firm on that point. I know I’d be the girl I see in those boxes, in every inky smudge in every lined notebook. Dutiful to a fault, clinging to my mother’s vases, keeping old baseball cards for my father.

And now, instead, I look over the Museum of Myself and see there’s not only change. There’s bravery. Fearlessness borne out of facing down death. There’s boisterous, ridiculous, ephemeral life. Love’s turned up at my window and beckoned me outside. And it’s 2025 and I’m alive and fragile and shipping myself over stone and sea, without a single assurance that I won’t arrive cracked. It’s terrifying wonderful. Wonderfying terrorfull.

Funny how this is also true of you, dear reader, true of all of us on this side of the material plane.