The Painting

Prologue: The Locket - An Locket (Part 1)

Prologue: Part 1

When I was a little girl I grew up in her presence - not her physically - but rather her things, her space, her face. She was always hidden behind the curtain and even though I could see her feet poking out from the bottom, every time I went to check behind it there was no one there. I suppose that is what drew me to her so deeply. To the enigma that seemed to encapsulate her life and eventually her death. For years it felt as if I was given a plastic spoon to unearth something underneath a layer of concrete, but I later found that what I gained was above rather than below the solid foundation.

They saved all her possessions. When I first heard that phrase, I hoped that 'they' would turn out to be a long lost grandmother, aunt, or even a cousin twice removed. 'They' as it turned out was the courts, they had packed up all her belongings and assigned them to a storage unit. I never thought of this as an act of kindness, but more an act of pity for a child who had lost her mother. There was no one but me who had the slightest connection to the contents of the eleven cardboard boxes.

Unit #16 was mine - I call it mine because I truly felt I had ownership of it - I was the one person in a world of billions who cared for it. My unit sat in the back corner of a larger storage facility that backed up to the highway at the edge of an 'in between town' of less than 500 people.

Storage facilities in themselves are odd places and the one mine belonged to was no exception. Storage units act as an acceptable arena for people to pay anywhere from $50-$300 to forget about their own or others personal belongings.

Most don't visit on the regular because it's easier to avoid. Storing Aunt Gertrude's plastic covered couch and doily collection is a pin prick on your index finger compared to the knowing wound that comes with confronting the memory of the woman herself. People don't visit storage containers on the weekends, after all it was the woman not her antique teapot that made you a cup of chamomile every Sunday afternoon. For some people objects - especially personal ones - are caught in a sort of purgatory, a limbo between sentiment and the Goodwill box. Some objects you can't quite part with but on the same hand you cannot fathom seeing every day.

I thought I would never become one of those people - the kind who are afraid to be confronted by inanimate objects - and I wasn't at first.

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