by Zoë Pollock
After her mother died, Janna Malamud Smith went through her belongings:
She had worked hard to sift and order while she still had strength. What she left was so condensed as to hold emotional weight disproportionate to its apparent mass. In four small rooms, her life, remnants of my father’s, my brother’s, my own; time past, piled, pressed dry, gathered into photo albums, into stacks of old pages recording earnings, debts paid, celebrations, bitter exchanges; mementos whose history became the sediment of hers; photographs everywhere of my children, of Italian forebears unmet, of friends now dead. I had to disassemble a universe.
(Photo: by South Korean photographer Seung Hoon Park as part of his series TEXTUS.)
The Dish 