"IT WON'T HURT MY FEELINGS"

So my aunt from New Jersey sent back a bunch of stuff with my mom, who has just visited her — stuff that she thought would "look good" in my house. This has happened a couple of times now in the four years I have lived here, and each time my mom says, "It's a good thing we didn't take the truck, or she would have sent everything in her basement."

"Yeah, it's a good thing," I agree, although I understand that my mom means something quite different by "it's a good thing." What she really means is, "it's a damn shame."

Whenever my mom gives me stuff like this she always says, "Now, you don't have to keep it if you don't like it. It won't hurt my feelings one bit. I'll just give it to the blind."

"The blind" is her way of referring to a charity for vision-impaired people. Every couple of months, some lady from "the blind" calls my mom and asks whether she has anything she wants to donate. And my mom will assemble a grocery sack full of Capri pants that don't fit her anymore, a seashell nightlight, an old cordless phone, some cinnamon-scented potpourri, stuff like that.

Every now and again she says something like, "The lady from the blind hasn't called in a while. I have stuff just piling up." She says it like the stuff is threatening to overtake house and home, when really it's a tiny stack neatly folded in the corner of a closet in her immaculately clean house.

I don't think these items actually go to blind people. They go to some thrift store where they're sold and the proceeds benefit blind people — the ones who need benefiting, that is. Still, I think when my mom is putting together her quarterly charity bag she is thinking things like, "I just bought this a year ago. It's in perfect condition. But no one is wearing teddy-bear prints anymore; a blind person might appreciate it, though."

One time a leukemia lady called, and my mom informed her that she was sorry but she gives all her stuff to the lady from the blind.

My mom would never admit this or talk about it in any way, but I think she has a soft spot for the blind because I am half blind. And she feels very bad about that. She thinks it is her fault somehow — if she hadn't left me with a bad baby sitter, it wouldn't have happened. I'd like to tell her sometime, "Yeah, Baby Sitter A wasn't a great choice, but maybe Baby Sitter B would have backed over me with a car or something. Who’s to say?” My point being that I'm totally past what happened and she should be, too. Maybe we will have that conversation someday; until then, I think she'll collect things for the blind, secretly thinking that I could have been among them, I could have been totally blind, and if I were it would be nice if someone gave me a pair of orange Capri pants that cost $50 new and have hardly been worn.

Anyway, back to my aunt's donations. Her name is Gerry, by the way, which is short for Geraldine — a name that made me laugh and laugh as a kid. I would ask her on her rare visits — she lived near San Francisco — if her name was really Geraldine, and we'd both giggle as she said, “Yeah. So?” Behind her back, my mom would say, "It sounds just like an old black lady's name — not that there's anything wrong with being black."

Here's what my Aunt Gerry sent: a paisley twin bedspread of indeterminate material and age (but definitely not cool 1970s paisley); a brand-new etched mirror that she and my mom touted as antique-looking (they think because I live in an old house that I adore anything that "looks old," even if it’s ridiculously shiny); and a cheap-gold-framed print of some old-timey milk-maid-looking damsel in various shades of mauve.

(These things sound way better in writing than they actually are. Trust me.)

I was aghast.

I could not believe my mom transported these treasures half way across the country to my doorstep. I wondered whether she seriously thought I might like these things, or whether she just couldn't bring herself to say no to my aunt's generosity.

"It won't hurt my feelings if you don't like them," she inevitably says.

And yet she tries to sell me on them. She takes the mirror into my dining room and holds it up on the wall. I am noncommittal. I display a lack of enthusiasm, which — from decades of knowing me — she takes for "I'm not interested." She lets it go. Then she brushes her hand across the bedspread and comments that it's in really great shape.

"It doesn't match any of my colors," I say.

This is something of a turning point for me, because normally I just go along with the game. But I feel the time has come to be assertive — to at least hint that I'm an adult now with my own house and my own tastes, and not some college kid who's desperate for any old hand-me-down. I feel ungrateful when I say it, but there it is.

"It doesn't match my colors," I say again.

My mom reluctantly agrees, but she looks a bit wounded.

I back up a bit: "But I can use it for an extra blanket when company comes. That would be nice."

"Oh yeah," my mom smiles. "You can never have too many blankets."

Then she holds up the picture. It fills me with so much disgust that I risk hurting my own mother's feelings again.

"I really don't like that," I say flatly. And I'm emboldened by my own honesty. If I don't draw the line somewhere, I really am going to wind up with a truckload of stuff from my aunt's basement, and then what will I do? Give it to the blind, sack by sack, for the next six years?

My mom looks wistfully at the picture, then puts it next to her purse, and we go out and work in my yard together.

I feel bad because I do have a soft spot for this particular aunt, perhaps because she is always proclaiming that I am her "favorite niece." This is a great compliment because she has dozens and dozens of nieces. Of course, she might tell all her nieces that, but she seems quite sincere when she's saying it. I also really liked her as a kid because she was different from all my other aunts. For one, she looked nothing like them. All my mom's sisters are like my mom: fair, blue-eyed, very Anglo Midwestern. But my Aunt Gerry, for some reason, looks like a Mexican. Dark hair, brown eyes, olive skin — but the exact same parents. I found that very exotic as a child, and even more so when I found out that her first husband, the one who carried her off to California, was an actual Mexican named Joe. (I had a huge thing for Latin men after becoming acquainted with Ricky Ricardo on “I Love Lucy”). My mom told me as a kid that Joe was a real bad man, so bad in fact that he got "kicked out" of the state of California. I never knew what that meant exactly, but I found it very intriguing. Gerry had six kids: five with Joe and one with some married dude she had an affair with. Then she ended up marrying this really smart, well-off guy who had three kids, and the two of them bought this fantastic 20-room house near San Francisco and lived there happily — and chaotically — with their nine offspring. One thing I remember about her visits is that she would always cook something new and fun. I had never had guacamole until she made it in my mom's kitchen, lamenting all the while that these avocadoes were not like the ones you get in California. I imagined that the ones in California were 10 times bigger and purple or something. When my mom would come back from visits to Gerry's house, she'd have tales about how polite the kids were, but how they stood right in the backyard and enjoyed a "marijuana cigarette" just like it was a popsicle. They'd plant the stuff right in my aunt's lawn, and she'd pull it up like a pesky weed and say "those damn kids." It was the first time I conceived of pot as something that normal, everyday people might do vs. something that only evil degenerates would even think of doing. Later, after Gerry and her husband ditched the kids, they lived in Europe for a few years, then set up house on the East Coast. Shortly after he retired, her husband was diagnosed with liver cancer and, the next month, he was dead. In the same week, her son died of some strange hemorrhage. Unfathomable. When all this happened, I remembered something she told me as a teenager. She said, "Love your mom a lot; she's had a really hard life."

When we come in from the yard work, my mom catches a glimpse of herself in the glass of my kitchen cabinet.

"I look like a wild Indian," she says, patting her wind-blown hair.

As she reaches into her purse for a comb, she spots something.

"I almost forgot this," she says, handing me an old envelope. "Gerry wanted you to have this."

I take it, thinking, "What could this possibly be?"

I open it and pull out some yellowed black and white snapshots: pictures from the early-1960s wedding of my mom and dad, who divorced when I was 4. It suddenly occurs to me that I have never seen a picture of their wedding. Why would I have? They both threw all that stuff out when they got remarried.

I look at the pictures for a long time and don't say anything. They are so young — two 19-year-olds photographed by my mom's older sister, Gerry, who, at 23 or so and the mother already of four, knew a few things about married life that my mom, in her sweet white dress, had yet to imagine.

"It won't hurt my feelings if you don't want those," my mom says, combing her hair. "Gerry just found them in her basement."

"Are you kidding?" I think. "I want a truckload of these."

But what I say to my mom is simply, “Tell Gerry thanks — for everything.”