Agrico SuperPhosphate

Hang: To be or remain suspended.

Hanging on, hanging in there, hanging tough.  The whole concept of hanging onto or releasing one's self from The Big Picture makes me re-ponder the lesser hanging onto that revolves around Stuff.  I stay amazed, a year plus after my mother's death, at the ability she had to ascribe great worth to the strangest, most sentimental, seemingly worthless things.  And this from a woman who had a great certainty as to what was Coming Next.  She just kept things, all manner of things, almost everything. 

I'm sure I've told the story about asking for some of my grandmother's old furniture, stored in mom's basement, moldering, deteriorating, increasingly buried in thicker, more impenetrable layers of dust.  SuperK and I had bought our first small house and needed some things to fill out the space.  We were, you see, in the midst of our own headlong pursuit of possessing more things. The answer was invariably no.  I asked for a while, my annoyance growing with leaps and bounds, until I finally figured out that I wasn't going to be able to pry this stuff from her surprisingly tough hands.  She always had a place for the furniture sometime and someplace in the future, undeterred by the fact she had been in the same house for almost 60 years.  We moved on, bought stuff to fill the spaces that didn't have any stuff in them, bought a bigger house that required more stuff, then a bigger house yet with still more stuff required.  Eventually we got tired of being responsible for all of the stuff and moved into smaller and smaller places, shedding stuff as we descended.

After we had moved 2618 miles away my mother, finally downsizing herself, started offering up these large pieces of furniture.  I honestly didn't know what to say.  I pointed out the great expense in shipping something to Vacation City, an expense transcending the value of the shipped thing.  I reminded her that we had already gotten rid of most of our stuff.  She remained undeterred until I finally said: "OK, mom, we'll take that piece of stuff.  Go ahead and ship it out."  Needless to say no stuff made the trek.

After she died I helped sort through the much diminished pile of stuff in my folks' apartment. Lots of junky stuff survived the downsizing transition.  Being a writerly type I was pleased to find stacks and stacks of little notepads and notebooks in a drawer.  While a lot of them were the standard give-aways found in hotel rooms there were also a lot of odd, ancient items.  Currently, I'm using a tiny book from Agrico, a company advertising something called "18% Normal Superphospate."  I flipped to the back cover today which had a calendar from 1949.  I discovered that the advertised product, after some research, dated to 1944.  The company itself is based in South Africa.

So my mother had possessed this notepad for 57 years.  I should point out that I'm using it.  I wonder what she had planned to do with it?  I wish I had asked her.