It’s snowing for the fourth time this year — amazing. This time, it’s those huge fat fluffy flakes, which are my favorites. The previous snows have been the fine diamond dust kind that sting your face, but these float down like bits of lace, or feathers, or clouds. Butterflies. Whatever, it’s really beautiful (though I’ll bet the sanitation workers outside my window who are picking up the mountains of trash find it less beautiful than I do), but it does kind of look like fake movie snow.

I just went to pull a stats book off my shelf and had to move this object off the top of that stack of books:

kinda creepy - it always scared me

This is a very heavy ceramic doorstop that always held the bedroom door open at my grandparents’ house, in Graham, Texas. No one had air conditioning, except for the occasional swamp cooler. We just relied on cross breezes, which could be quite rare, and lots of iced tea. Still, there would be windy days, as there are on the open plains, and heavy doorstops kept the doors held back so they didn’t slam shut.

That one always creeped me out — the face looked scary, mean, sly. Too much make-up, fake cat. And who does their eyebrows like that, c’mon. But I’ve kept it all these years, moved it with me 70+ times, even when I took nothing with me but what I could hold in my hands. It reminds me so much of my grandparents, Mom and Big Daddy. When I look at it, I feel their house in my bones, the particular smells come back, the memory of Big Daddy’s fake vinyl lazy-boy reclined in front of the ancient tv where he sat to watch wrestling, the smell of that green liniment I rubbed on his feet. The smell of pinto beans and cornbread cooking in the kitchen, where we sat on red vinyl chairs around an old metal table. The old quilt I slept on, on the floor, with the soft flannel back that was powder blue with orange rockets, and tied with orange cotton string. Big Daddy’s smell, that was a combination of Red Man chewing tobacco and Four Roses hair oil. Mom’s smell that was a combination of Avon carnation sachet and Dr. Pepper.

I’m a kind of orphan, with only a very small handful of things from my past — this doorstop, a small wooden boat my dad made when he was a boy, a falling-apart copy of Little Women, and a few pictures of my young childhood that I rescued from a dumpster. Each one of these things carries a lot of weight, because they carry all the memories. And you know how memories are; they’re there but you don’t really know it, or think about them except in a category way (summers at Big Daddy’s) until you open that door and see all the detail that’s tucked away inside that category. The sensory details, the stories — like Big Daddy taking me to the rodeo on summer nights, to get us both out of the house and away from my mean old grandmother who was strung out; like Big Daddy waking me up at 4am every morning to ride into town with him — the feelings that aren’t really attached to any one moment.

I guess some day I’ll give that creepy cat to one of my kids, even though it has absolutely no meaning to them. It’s really just in my way, it’s not like I have any space to spare, but it’s far too big to throw away, if you know what I mean.