Neatness doesn't count when your room is full of memories

The Boston Herald

Beverly Beckham

She is upstairs cleaning her room, the 21-year-old. The new college graduate is out, out, damn spotting childhood and adolescence to make way for the working woman she has become.

Necessity has forced her to do this. She can't fit what she brought home, what she has collected in the past four years, in a room that is a storehouse for her first 17.

The task is daunting.

She yells down to me every now and then, "Mom, come here!" and I do, making my way past cartons that block the hall and laundry baskets top-heavy with clothes.

I stand at her bedroom door and smile because it's the one thing that has remained constant all these years: My daughter's room is a mess. It always has been, and it probably always will be.

After we bought her the daybed she begged for, she hung up her clothes for an entire week; after we wallpapered and painted and had the hardwood floor refinished, she kept her room clean for a whole week and a half. But except for these brief intervals of orderliness, her room has been a charming mess.

She tries to be neat, really she does. She's trying now. But we both know it's useless. She has inherited from me an inability to throw things away.

"What am I going to do with all my stuffed animals?" she asked the first time she yelled for me. "Look at them. They're old and they're dirty and they're falling apart, but how can I just get rid of them?"

She can't. And I can't tell her to.

"Put them in a plastic bag," I suggested. "We can store them down cellar."

Down cellar - that's how we say it. Down cellar actually used to be a nice place. But that was before we started piling things there: an old stereo, a couch with only one missing cushion, prints and wallhangings, baby clothes, doll clothes, old clothes that somebody might want someday, Golden Books, school books.

A while later she called for me again.

"I don't know what to do with my sophomore semi shoes."

"Keep them," I told her. "They don't take up much space."

"But they're old and dirty, Mom, and they don't fit. I got them when I was 15. I should throw them away."

"Put them in a donation pile. Someone else can probably use them."

She hesitated, held the shoes in her hands and sighed. "I'm afraid that if I don't keep them, I won't remember the semi."

It continued like that all day. She went downstairs a few times, getting plastic bags, which is a good sign. I even heard her moving furniture and emptying drawers.

But mostly I listened to silence, which in this case is not a good sound. It meant she was reading old letters and diaries and cards, and looking through old scrapbooks and papers.

It meant she won't part with these things, because I've told her a million times how I threw away my high school diary and wish I hadn't, and how I would give anything to still have my Debbie Reynolds/Eddie Fisher scrapbook, which I made in sixth grade.

Suddenly she is standing in front of me, at my office door, doubled over with laughter.

"You aren't going to believe what I just found," she says, dangling a clear plastic baggie with what looks like a small pebble inside.

"It's XXXX XXXX's gum. I saved it. I labeled it. See? I was so crazy about him I actually kept a piece of his chewed gum. All those years I liked him, and he never even asked me out."

"Well, there's one thing you can get rid of," I say.

She shakes her head no. "I'd never throw this away. Someday when I'm an old lady, I'll look at it and I'll remember. And if I have grandchildren and they like someone who doesn't like them, I won't have to imagine how they feel. I'll know."

She returns to her room again to finish what I'm certain she'll never get done. But it doesn't matter. Neatness is overrated anyway.