Summerscapes: A Vacation From My Past

Nice reflective piece in the NYT about an immigrant observing his own adjustment to the new familiar of a new home.

“The task I had taken on that day was to clean out the tool shed that had belonged to Andrew’s late father. It was so jammed with stuff that I could barely push the door wide enough to squeeze inside. After I cleared a little room, I began to fling things out into a pile to be taken away ? cans of rusted bolts and nails and hinges, battered metal boxes filled with the ghosts of tools past, packages of mildewed linoleum tiles, moth-eaten fishing vests and jackets, corroded gutter pipes and rakes, fishing tackle that had come unwound from its spool and lay in a great webbing on the floor. As I waded through these layers of the past, I thought how hard it must have been for Andrew’s father, a child of the Depression, to throw anything away. And then, a passage from the Tirukkural, an ancient work of Tamil philosophy, rose into my mind ? ‘As one by one we give up, we get freer and freer of pain.'”

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