The Tribune

I don’t remember the last time our daughter slept in the bedroom that we still refer to as her room. But it must have been well over 20 years ago. And in all this time, it stayed just the way she left it, her tennis trophies at the top of a tall cabinet, her baseball bat and softball stacked in between a stuffed teddy bear with a college graduation cap and a pocket-size bible. Even when I claimed a window alcove for a desk, lamp, printer and a stack of files and called it my home office, we did not disturb the room she grew up in.

And then we decided it was time to paint it. The rest of the house is a natural wood. It is cypress inside and out. If you had to describe the colour, the closest thing would be warm honey, the rich, warm tone of raw, oiled wood. But her room, this room since she was small, was coral with turquoise trim around the windows. (Don’t ask me why. It just was. It seemed like the right thing to do at the time.)

Twenty-some years later, it was time for a change and as we prepared to paint, I found myself in for a journey for which I was totally unprepared. Yearbooks from the schools she attended here and abroad. Photo albums dating back to the days when pictures had a life outside your phone. Scads of memorabilia and books and cards, mittens from somewhere cold she must have visited, though I can’t remember where.

She’ll be 40 on her next birthday and I will be wondering where the time went.

This week, though, time was pressing, the painter was taping around the high ceiling, still, thankfully the colour of natural wood, and around the floor, oak darkened by time and thousands of barefoot steps.

What to keep, what to let go

I always knew the time would come but even 20 years later, I was not prepared to rummage through the tangible items of a child’s life and decide what to keep, what to give or throw away and what to take to her. It’s not that she lives far away. In really bad traffic, it’s still less than 30 minutes. So you would think the sensible thing to do is to load it all up in boxes and let her decide what she wants to keep and what she doesn’t.

Slight problem – she’s one of the busiest and most industrious people I know and figuring out what to do with a 25-year-old oversized birthday card that plays music when you open it is not exactly what she would consider a crushing priority. Nor does she want to take that long look back at images she tried hard to overcome and she is probably just as stumped as I am about what to do with participation awards or a trophy for playing street hockey when it is not even a recognised sport yet throwing it away means there are no more tangible reminders of the days streets in Nassau were friendly enough that you could block one off for the kids every Sunday afternoon.

The older you get, the more you accumulate and the more you accumulate, the harder it is to figure out what to keep and what to toss when one of life’s crossroads hits you smack in the face. You are moving and have to pack – what to take, what to leave. A family member passes – what to keep, what to share. A child turns into an adult and moves out – what triggers the recall of special moments and keeps the memories alive of a childhood that can never be re-enacted?

No guide on what to do

There is no right or wrong, no instruction manual on what to keep and what to share, what to pack away and what to throw away. But here is a clue. Don’t do as I did. I pulled everything out of my daughter’s room, decided to donate the tall cabinet where all the books and photo albums, trophies, pilot’s licence instructions videos, PADI learn-to-dive material, the field trips mementoes, FODOR’s guides to places I’ve never been, the large and tiny trinkets, the children’s book on how to tie knots from when she was first learning to sail, and, oh yes, her clothes, I pulled it all out, all at once. And then having decided to donate that seven-foot-high cabinet that had held it all to Ranfurly, I had to find a place for everything in the drawers and shelves that had held proof of her young and outdoorsy life. So I did the only practical thing I could think of, short of actually deciding what to keep and what to toss. I moved it all to the dining room where the table is stacked high with stuff, and you can barely move around, and we now have another decision on our hands – where to eat.

But I would not have missed the opportunity or an unplanned journey to look back through the years of a childhood in The Bahamas and I saw what a treasure it was. Outdoors activities year-round. Freedom to play in the street. Friends who shared the same sports and activities and interests and the seemingly endless days at the beach. I thought how different that cabinet would have looked had it been an indoor life.

They don’t give trophies for reading on a wintry day or playing board games or begging parents to be allowed to go outside even if it’s raining and cold. I thought how fortunate the children of The Bahamas are to grow up in a place where they see birds fly all year long, where in places like Nassau and the Family Islands, the sight of the water is never very far away, where every kid knows what season it is by the dilly or mango you can eat when you climb a tree.

How fortunate the children of The Bahamas are to be bathed in the light of Nature’s finest and how sad that despite growing up in one of the most glorious places on Earth, so many children lack the love they deserve. Care and kindness, understanding and encouragement can never be stored on the shelves of a cabinet, yet they are the true trophies a child takes to adulthood, the culling of their character, the shaping of their humanity. the stuff which one day will make them the parent they need to be.

Maybe it does not matter so much about the physical debris of trophies and books and albums and such and what to keep and what to toss. So what if the dining room is cluttered with junk for now? As I said, I would not have missed the journey for the world, even if it were a by-road taken by a simple need to paint a room, neither intended nor mapped or GPS’d.

And, not that it matters, but the room does look a lot better painted white.