Maybe it’s the change of season or my nearing birthday. Or it’s my friend who moved into a tiny house, and anticipates deciding whether to hold on or release the stuff collected in her life. Or is it a dear friend’s cancer diagnosis or missing my parents? Whatever its determinant, I feel a newer sense of urgency beckoning me into new places. Some days I wonder if I should move more quickly to visits to places I’ve never been and resist the comforts of being at home with excursions throughout my nearby community.

Maybe that’s why spying my grandson napping on my old bed, exuding kissable squidgy skin and unending smiles when awake, set me off. The bed. I know it’s just stuff. Stuff that doesn’t mean much in the end when we understand life is mostly about the people we love. As I waded through a decade helping my parents’ downsize, I took on some items but determinedly turned many away. Even some that were beloved, often without rhyme or reason. Dad’s maritime and Oregon history books and a few prints from their wall and my parents’ bins of writing and photo albums. Keep. Clothes other than Mom’s OSU sweatshirt found new homes. Mostly our parents didn’t collect traditionally valuable items.

Yes, Russ and I too will need to downsize at some point. Will we move out of this house and community we’ve lived in now for more than half of my life? I’m quick to remind myself again: mostly stuff and accumulation doesn’t matter so much to me. Or am I kidding myself? What about this bed and its matching dresser? Oh, what dreams have been formed in this bed? When items have spanned generations, I think about how times have changed, and the people who have both come and gone. Yet the pieces remain, existing through the decades. I recently donated chairs to the Willamette Heritage Center (see: Time traveling to the secrets of our past: part 1) that originally belonged to my 3rd Great Grandmother Chloe. Yet I didn’t feel as emotional as I do now, seeing my grandson in this bed. This bed once belonged to this child’s third great grandmother, my great grandmother – but it too was the childhood bed for both me and his mom.

What stories and travels might hide in the grain of its wood? I was three when we moved into our new, larger house in Wilsonville and this became my bedroom set with its matching dressers. After all, my two younger brothers would need the crib or whatever bed I slept in before, just like they got the bikes I grew out of. At some point in the 1960s Mom stained the bedroom set green. I can’t imagine who would have thought that an improvement. I remember special white sheets with purple flowers that embraced me as I slept, different than the sheets slept in by my brothers in twin beds. But the clearest memories for me are the nights my youngest brother (See: Ode to my baby brother) Rick would come sleep with me as he feared nightmares and monsters and other small child worries. He was a wee tyke and sometimes got stuck tucked in those flowery sheets between the wall and the mattress. The bed then journeyed to our Illahee beach house as a holding place, me sleeping in two other beds during our short time in LaGrande and my high school years in Portland. The time must have felt right when our daughter was old enough for such a large bed, three decades after I slept in it nightly, and Dad trucked it back to Portland for its return to unstained oak, and into our home of today. Where the little guy sleeps some days now. He won’t remember these moments and I wouldn’t ever guess to imagine where that bed might be five or ten years from now.

Yet as I spotted him napping on that bed, it struck me more than it ever has about my emotional tie to this single piece of furniture. It was purchased sometime around 1915 when Georgia Gill and William Montgomery moved into their house at 3115 NW Thurman. I wonder now – was it a gift from her father, J.K.? From William? Did she choose it herself? I never knew her and William died when I was small. I do know this bed was fed by dreams, happy ones, nightmares and parental arguments, silly stories I told my little brother and daughter, nighttime prayers and talk times. If a bed and its ensuring years could be opened like a book, imagine the hopes and dreams and stories it might hold?

And yet, in the end, it is stuff. Yes, I have this photo to trigger memories. This writing to remind me if I forget. And, as I did with Mom – even when her memories were hidden from her and she couldn’t see the print on the page – perhaps my grandson will someday remind me about the story I told him about the days he napped on this bed, once slept in by his mom and third great grandmother. And me.

Georgia Gill and William Montgomery with siblings Dick and Bill, and cousin Ann; 1937 at 3115 NW Thurman.