Staff Picks: Odes, #Ads, and Amazing Grace

Kathryn Scanlan.

Recently, a friend told me about a job she’d had clearing out an apartment in Chelsea. It belonged to a woman who’d recently died, a woman my friend had never met. The woman was a hoarder, and when her apartment became impassible, she’d bought the one next door. In her final days, just enough space was cleared in her first apartment for her bed and hospice nurses. Slowly, my friend pieced together the woman’s life—an antique Chinese tea case shoved full of highlighters, hundreds of self-help books, thousands of photographs. A photo of the woman and her husband, who’d left her in her youth, naked in the bath with their cat; photos from her solo travels to Mongolia, Israel, and China. The woman had died alone,, grants every reader that simultaneous pull between mystery and intimacy. Some pages contain only a single sentence: “Robin on nest today,” “Terrible windy everything loose is traveling.” And yet buried within this pragmatic poetry (“Fog out. I sure slept. Took a Nytol.”) is a life, a death. These barest clues—of new lights installed and tomatoes canned, tombstones bought and weeds tormented, a self-help book with a photograph from decades before tucked inside—are the ones that make us fall in love.