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Old Ruby's smial had shrunken down over the years as she closed off rooms and sealed doors. Some rooms in this place were left forgotten when they became too much for her to care for, other parts of the house had been left untended as they broke, like the front door that stood permanently sealed. Nora had once rambled through this whole place with her brother Fosco. Now there wasn’t room to do much rambling besides in her memories.
Even the little space left told the story of how this place became too much for Old Ruby to handle. So many things had landed where they didn’t belong. Furniture half covered sealed doorways, like Old Ruby had tried to hide that there’d ever been something back there at all, only to run out of motivation before she’d finished. Cups and utensils lay scattered on the floor and loose paintbrushes on the kitchen shelves. What had once been personal to a Hobbit’s story had turned into clutter. It was just so much stuff now, most of it too worn out to be much use. Nora picked up a pillow off the floor, tucking it under her arm as she thought.
She sat in a threadbare rocker, feeling the wooden frame squeeze her bottom through the thinning cushion. Once this fit Old Ruby, her brother, and herself all at once, the two of them piled into Ruby's lap as she told them stories or sang them songs. Nora fiddled with the old key in her pocket, trying to remember what it had once unlocked. Years ago Ruby had given it to her to play with when she couldn’t sit still for her lessons, and now she’d been carrying it again of late, trying to soothe her restless fingers. Maybe if she held it for long enough, Old Ruby wouldn’t feel so far away.
Nora had played here a lot, both with her brother and without, as Old Ruby watched over her from this chair. She’d let Nora hold tea parties with her dishes, and play dress up with her clothes, and build forts with her blankets. A teacup now sat near her foot, and she picked it up and ran her finger along the lip, where a tiny crack scratched her fingers and undoubtedly scratched Old Ruby’s lip whenever she used it to drink. A walk around the smial brought other things into her hands: a paintbrush with the bristles falling out from the hard use of a child learning to paint her first picture, a wooden figurine with an arm broken off from a tumble from the shelf, a picture drawn by a child that was now so faded over time and over memory that she was no longer sure which way was up or down. Over the years this smial had filled with these little marks, ceramic glued and cloth mended where a child had played too roughly, marks where an old Hobbit had been kind enough to welcome a young one. Old Ruby could have replaced any one of these things, but instead she kept these little treasured memories everywhere. There was a part of Old Ruby embedded into every one of these worn out and damaged objects, and a part of Nora, and a part of Fosco, too.
She held the pile in her arms, as Old Ruby once held Nora in her own arms. Fosco was always telling her off for bringing useless things home, but these things had stories in them, like that key had the story of her learning her letters. If something had a story or a memory in it, then it wasn't useless. It was a mathom. She'd take as much as she could carry, and sort it through when her heart wasn't hurting.