drying dusters

in my parents' front hall.  Which is not at all the same as Dry as Dust.  

My enthusiasm that they have someone coming in five days a week for a couple of hours to - to what?  Help?  Clean?  has been severely muted now that my father tells me that she is very good at Throwing Things Out.  There are things - plenty of things - that mean - well, don't in some ways mean a lot, but that are, nevertheless, part of my own history.  Do I want to hang onto them?  No.  But would I like to have taken a small square of the blanket woven from shoddy in my great-grandfather's shoddy mill?  Yes.  And then there are plenty of objects, like the eiderdown that I had when I was little, that all I want to do - to have done - is take a photograph.  Earlier this year I made my father promise not to throw things out before I could do just that because, as I told him, there's no way that I would expect him to know what had sentimental value to me and what didn't.  But that promise didn't stick.  Instead, I had an earful about my Not Having Been Here - which, given the circumstances of the past few months, seemed a little unfair.  I'm sure this happens to so many of us, but I'm using this space, for once, to wail and lament.