I am old and I deserve the privilege of being around old things. Now most things around me are new. When I was a child I was surrounded old things.
Our neighbor Mrs. Cedarholm was old. She lived in an old farm house on the edge of town. She was surrounded by old things. Her reading chair was becoming unstuffed and grumbled when she sat down in it. On a three legged table beside the chair was a well-worn Bible and a green glass bowl brimming with old buttons. A chandelier hung on a frayed cord over the caramel oak dining room table. She served me cookies on a porcelain plate that had long since lost its luster. A butter mold, a candlestick, a foot-peddle sewing machine, these things formed the place of her life.
In her garage was an old Chevrolet. My favorite old place was a ramshackle barn behind her house. Rusty hinges complained when I pushed open the door. Inside smelled of old wood and aged leather. Harnesses hung on iron nails. The floor was a compound of cracked dirt, rotten straw and cow dung. The barn wafted an edgy sweetness.
The old barn attracted a constellation of old equipment her husband had used to work the farm; a plow, a harrow, a manure spreader. The grand prize was a 1927 Fordson F tractor with steel wheels. I would drive back and forth harvesting grain from fields of ripe imagination until boredom set in.
Now in my seventies, it is hard to find old things. There are few things older than you, my grandson says as a joke. Little of the old is saved, I replied. Little of the old is saved. Now the premium is on new and improved which usually just means new. The first quality of old things is that they have lasted. I replaced my fifteen year old microwave last week and the man installing the new one said I would be lucky if it lasted five years. Old things remind us of an era of innocence, when things were expected to last and goodness would inevitably outlast evil.
Old things go back. They momentarily take us back with them. They remind us of former times, times with a different character, when the map of the world in our heads was less complicated. At the same time, one must be careful of nostalgia, a cheap form of sentimentality that sets us longing for the good old days and clouds our memory regarding the bad parts of the good old days. Old things are emblems of the great parade of time. They remind us that the world arrived before we did and will remain long after we are gone. We are always between a past we had nothing to do with and a future on which we will have little influence. We enter, we last, we take our leave. Some things sturdier than I will last.
Perhaps a lingering smell, an obsolete color, a water stain on a photograph will hint of my time.