By Amy Barnes
“things that exist or are used or enjoyed for only a short time”
There’s something poetic to my writer self in the idea of ephemera. Fragile. Temporary. Parenting in a nutshell. A short time to enjoy kids, as kids. A short time of them existing in your house until they drift away like tissue paper or person-sized snowflakes. There’s something heartbreaking in the word to my parent self. A short time. I wonder how birds launch new kids every year. My paper heart couldn’t bear that.
Both my kids are away at college now. We dropped them and their varying degrees of stuff; my son with bare basics, my daughter with a truck and carload of decor and wardrobe – and paper. My nest is empty-ish. There’s a bird’s nest level of organized chaos of left-behind packing and life things that I can’t quite sweep away because their fingerprints are still fresh.
I feel like I am made of ephemera, like the Gingham paper dolls I bought with my pocket money as a kid. A walking and breathing collective of all the paper that represents my kids and my own life. A paper parent. A writer surrounded by words on paper. My paper uterus is empty of babies. My paper house is emptied of children now too. I’m an ephemera mother that weaves together paper my kids have left behind into a new nest, a different nest, one with nearly-empty bedrooms and paper toenail clippings and paper hair on paper brushes and a black construction paper dog that mopes in the corner for paper fingers to pet her.
I’m not new to precious, fragile paper things. I of course have writer’s journals and notebooks and piles of books scattered in piles throughout my house. Years ago, I went to a live taping of Antiques Roadshow with our heavy family Bible in hand. There were a LOT of Bibles at the Ephemera Table. All with no monetary value, only sentimental, the appraiser told us gently. I watched the Keno Brothers as they dashed, and offered hope, to people with tags from the Furniture sign-in table. The wood furniture was related to my paper, all from the same trees, manipulated into books or chairs. Most of it was worthless too even with the requisite paper furniture maker tag that might mean something.
Sitting in my same, but different, nest after dropping off both kids, I’m amazed by all the bits of ephemera left behind. Elementary art projects. High school science projects. Receipts. Love notes. Birthday cards. Envelopes full of posed school pictures. Report cards. Essays. Rows of math calculations on notebook and graph paper. Birth certificates and passports. Board books. Middle grade books. Young adult books. Adult books. Powers of attorney paperwork. Series lined up on bookshelves. Boxes. Pressed paper furniture that won’t fit in their dorms. Posters and poster boards. A 4H project with cotton scraps and captions. A still-messy volcano. Book reports. A plague doctor mask. Medical records. Halloween costumes. Cotton balls. Cotton make-up pads. Sheet music and books. There are unboxed boxes, tags from bean bags that have left behind tiny Styrofoam comfort balls down the hallway. Ripped off shirt tags and price tags. Papery plastic blue IKEA bags discarded too, the ones with broken handles or the stink of dirty clothes brought home for my washer that works better. Graduation diplomas in fancy frames.
Paper. Paper mache. Books. Paper. Paper. Paper.
18 layers of archaeological childhoods, and early adulthood. It’s like the Ice Age happened and all the children/dinosaurs disappeared, leaving behind history buried in paper, instead of ice.
The definition of ephemera nags at me. We’ve only had our kids in our home for the briefest of times. They’re acutely aware too. We talk together about the limbo they’re in now: a new dorm room or apartment every year with only short summers and holidays back at home. Even their mattress pads are compressed and folded, expanding only in their dorm rooms near rolls and rolls of the good toilet paper. They both come home, but also not.
I’m oddly fearful of another limbo: all that ephemera moving to digital even though that sounds lovely for work papers or all the school papers. From artwork to concerts to thesis papers, the paper is disappearing. Some days that feels like a good thing. Less visible mess. But what happens when everything moves from paper to temporary emails and texts and computer files? Are the tangible memories gone too if we can’t touch or see the corresponding paper? What and when do we toss paper memories?
Both kids are studying the blueprints of things – one DNA and the other, spaceships. They plot out the lives of people and machines. These things are imprinted from past and present data. They both rail a little at the endless statistics required to measure and analyze. It’s perhaps the less interesting part of research, but they also recognize that it’s necessary. It’s the past intersecting with current and future data. Millions of data points created to exist for only a short time, but also forever as new scientific discoveries are made.
It’s the ultimate intersection of paper and people. The fragility. The bird’s nest mess of nature and human tinsel and hair ribbons and space patterns and DNA sequencing. The biostatistics of how a kindergartener becomes a college student, becomes a parent, becomes middle-aged, becomes the person to hold my paper hand in the last moments. Wills and official documents replacing baby books and term papers. Because that is the aching side of being paper people – parents are temporary too.
As I sift through left-behind ephemera, I’m choosing to redefine the word. I will enjoy my grown-up paper people and all their paper for as long as possible.
Read Amy’s other work here at Reckon.
Amy Barnes
Amy Barnes is the author of three short fiction collections: AMBROTYPES published by word west, Mother Figures at ELJ, Editions and CHILD CRAFT, forthcoming from Belle Point Press. Her words have appeared in a wide range of publications including: The Citron Review, JMWW Journal, Janus Lit, Flash Frog, Nurture Lit, Complete Sentence, Gone Lawn, The Bureau Dispatch, Nurture Lit, X-R-A-Y Lit, McSweeney’s, SmokeLong Quarterly, Apartment Therapy, Southern Living, Motherly, Romper, Allrecipes and many others. She’s been nominated for Best of the Net, the Pushcart Prize, Best Microfiction, long-listed for Wigleaf50 in 2021 and 2022, and included in Best Small Fictions 2022. She’s a Fractured Lit Associate Editor, Gone Lawn co-editor, Ruby Lit assistant editor and reads for Retreat West, The MacGuffin, and Narratively.