Sentiment

Broke a bottle of perfume this morning. Never the one to really follow rules that dictate replacing lids tightly and never holding glass bottles by the lid, it had to happen sooner or later....Though with this particular item it has taken a full eight years. On numerous occassions these past eight years I have rapped two tiny pairs of fingers for climbing shelves and reaching to all things on shelf three.

The mess was slovenly cleaned up. But the whole apartment was emanating fire and ice. My neighbour offered her condolences and asked if it was a rarely-used treasured object, and if I had wanted wanted to preserve for forever kinds. I was stunned at this thought. She was equally stunned at my surprise. She said she has a bottle of perfume that she had used at her wedding and that she often just smells it to recollect those moments.

Hmm...this thing occupied my mind for a few hours. I guess the environment has conditioned me. My parents moved homes/places every single year till I was fourteen. That meant eight different schools till class eight. The cleanliness freaks made sure there never was anything in the house that was not currently in use or good shape. Except of course things that were produced using Guttenberg's ideas. No artworks (if only they had been preserved - I could have VOWed my current art instructor), no school books/notebooks beyond the last day of school for the year. Though I do remember somehow culling a whole load of greeting cards (only the pictures...the messages carefully scissored away) over the decades, and my brothers having truckloads of stamps. We even disposed off the veena when I discontinued my lessons!

My in-laws...they are different. They are very sentimentally attached to places, people and things. When we visited their village last month, it was moving to listen to their narration of the house they lived in, the fields they had tilled, the temples they worshipped, the rivers they swam in... Last year they gave S the piggy bank that their children had used. They even fished out the key from and ocean of metal stuff. The ocean also yielded cute kid-sized dinner plates about thirty years new.

Now, after all these years, in the scale of sentiment I can claim to be somewhere in between my in-laws and parents, tilting more towards the former. But still, worshipping perfume bottles....I still have a long way to go.

To continue lifting lines from an ancient poetry book (my fathers copy!) to which I am sentimentally attached.. heres Robert Frost

Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I've tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.