Y'all Come Sit a Spell

Come sit a spell.

I have a confession.

I name things.

Not just pets.

That would be normal.

I name plants.

I name pieces of glass.

I name pottery.

I name particularly troublesome book projects.

Anything that spends enough time in my house is at risk of acquiring both a name and an unnecessarily detailed personality.

I don’t intentionally do this.

I’ve never brought home an estate-sale vase and thought:

Excellent. My first order of business will be to establish your identity.

It just happens.

I’ll be walking through the house one day, glance at something and think:

Well, hello, Gloria.

And that’s it.

She’s Gloria now.

I don’t make the rules.

Occasionally the system is less reliable.

I will name something, forget what I named it, and give it another name three days later.

This does not concern me.

Apparently the object simply wasn’t committed enough to its original identity.

It happens.

But then there are the names that arrive fully formed.

Those are different.

You don’t choose them.

You recognize them.

Bertha.

Bertha was never going to be an Emily.

Absolutely not.

You could look at Bertha from across the room and know that woman has never been an Emily a day in her life.

Eventually she became Bertha LouEllen.

Because apparently Bertha alone was insufficient to contain the personality involved.

BertieLou if she’s being sweet.

But fundamentally?

Bertha.

Forever.

And this is where people who don’t name inanimate objects begin looking at me strangely.

I understand.

From the outside, perhaps it seems unnecessary.

It’s a vase.

It’s a plant.

It’s a rock.

It’s a book file.

It does not need a name.

Counterpoint:

Have you met it?

Because that vase may have opinions.

The plant is unquestionably dramatic.

The rock has been sitting there looking smug for six months.

And the book file has caused enough emotional distress to qualify as an immediate family member.

These aren’t anonymous objects anymore.

We’ve been through things together.

Plants are particularly susceptible to naming because plants are already ridiculous.

Anyone who tells you plants don’t have personalities has never owned a peace lily.

A peace lily will look perfectly healthy at breakfast and by lunch be collapsed across the pot like a Victorian woman who has just received news from the front.

You rush over.

“OH MY GOD. WHAT HAPPENED?”

Water.

It wanted water.

That’s it.

Forty-five minutes later it’s standing upright again pretending the entire incident never occurred.

You cannot live with that level of drama and continue referring to it as the plant.

It needs a name.

Possibly a middle name.

The vintage things are different.

Maybe I name them because they’ve already had lives before they came to me.

An old piece of pottery sitting on an estate-sale table isn’t just an object.

Somebody chose it.

Somebody brought it home.

It sat on somebody else’s shelf.

It survived moves and holidays and redecorating and children and grandchildren and decades of people saying, “What are we going to do with that?”

And somehow it ended up here.

I don’t necessarily know who made it.

I don’t know who owned it.

I don’t know where it spent the last fifty years.

But I know one thing.

Her name is Hilda.

Don’t ask me how I know.

I just do.

Then there are the rocks.

Rocks probably don’t need names.

In my defense, most of them don’t have them.

That would be excessive.

I have standards.

But every collection eventually contains a few specimens that cross some invisible line from interesting mineral to little dude who lives over there.

Once that happens, there’s no going back.

The strange part is that naming something changes the way you talk about it.

Nobody says:

“The large peace lily is drooping.”

No.

They say:

“Rita is being dramatic again.”

And everyone in the household knows exactly what that means.

Nobody asks:

“What large, extremely complicated publishing project are you working on?”

They ask:

“How’s Bert?”

And the answer might be:

“She’s being an asshole.”

Perfectly normal conversation.

Maybe that’s really why I do it.

Names turn objects into stories.

And I like stories.

I like wondering where old things came from.

I like imagining personalities for objects that absolutely do not have them.

I like having a house full of things that were chosen because they made me stop and look twice, not because they matched the sofa.

So perhaps it was inevitable that eventually they’d all start introducing themselves.

Some stay.

Some get sold.

Some get propagated.

Some get revised to 539 pages and sent to Amazon while I whisper threats at them.

But while they’re here, they’re part of the cast.

And cast members need names.

So if you ever come to my house and I say:

“Careful, Gloria’s behind you,”

don’t panic.

There’s probably not another person in the room.

Probably.

Just move slowly and ask me who Gloria is.

I’ll introduce you.