A Family Inheritance: More Than 'Things' ... Emblems of Our Lives
When my paternal grandfather passed away, one of the provisions of his will was that all household goods were to go to his one daughter — my mother. The three grandchildren were each to choose three keepsakes from the house. One cousin (female) was nine years my senior, the other (male) two. None of us was a child, so at the time, we were struck by the thoughtfulness of such a bequest.
Vintage jewelry, Wikimedia Commons
We arrived to have the door opened by Josephine, my mother's sister-in-law. I'd spent many happy hours with my cousins in their house in school holidays. My uncle was a jolly, enjoyable man. The hundreds of hours spent at 'the farm' were still always outstanding ones during those growing-up years. The house was like a second home, partly constructed of fantasies of a completely foreign and enchanting existence after the pleasant anonymity of New York's lower east side.
The farm was in central Ohio, and my parents and I lived in New York City. Since my aunt and her husband (my mother's brother) and their two children lived only about ten minutes away, it wasn’t a surprise that they were on the scene before my mother and I were.
I hurried to the big china cabinet in the dining room to put in my bid for iridescent finger bowls like soap bubbles I'd never seen anywhere but on their shelf in the glass-fronted cabinet. From the time I could walk, I'd spent time on every visit gazing at what looked like something from fairy tales.
In the living room of this house was my mother's piano, built specially for her when she was a serious music student in her teens and early twenties. A 'parlor grand' fashioned by Steinway and cased in polished cherry with deeply carved cabriole legs. It was a beautiful thing of itself.
The front hall housed an enormous grandfather clock with the phases of the moon as well as the sun rising and setting according the date and time, its Westminster chimes a cherished accent of my childhood. That house and its surroundings are still almost part of me physically. I can’t think how much more it must have meant to my mother who had grown up there, though her occasional references to events were without visible emotion. Still, that was her style about life in general.
By the time we left that afternoon, my mother had told me that Josephine had claimed the grandfather clock, the piano, and the finger bowls I so coveted. I erupted with fury. At nineteen, perhaps I should have known better, but I was livid.
"Why didn’t you point out to her the terms of the will?" I demanded.
My mother kept her eyes on the road as she drove down the driveway to the state highway. "Not worth a fight," she said flatly.
I fumed. "But she has no right..."
My mother cut me off. "They're only things," she said, not for the first time I'd heard her make that remark, though never before in such a loaded (to me) situation.
My mother passed away at ninety-two. Those words were to be repeated a number of times before she died, and they always silenced me. Because I'm only six years away from her final age, now I've realized the implications of her by-word are important and practical. The trouble is that now I've also come to realize that concrete objects have a variety of values besides the intrinsic or esthetic ones to which I assume my mother referred.
In that same house was a set of golden oak library furniture in what was always referred to as the morning room. The slant-front desk had two fully three-dimensional carved gnomes sitting with one leg crossed over the other on the spiral-carved stiles that supported the drawers. Similar figures adorned the four legs of the matching library table with its curved stretchers beneath, where another little man sat where those stretchers crossed. Glass doors covered the shelves of the bookcases with spiral posts surmounted by more gnomes at each end.
Even then I didn't like golden oak, even though I knew it had been the fashion at one time, but I was enchanted by the carving. The workmanship was museum quality. Later I learned that the furniture had been made by the German craftsmen (pattern makers, they were called) my grandfather and his brother and cousin had recruited as part of the design and manufacture of the first roller doors made for factories and large warehouses. The three men had started fortunes with the help of those immigrant woodworkers. Their wonderful art would outlast us all and our children. The furniture seemed in its aura of elegance and rarity to be examples of the prime of life of that generation of entrepreneurs; each was one of a kind. I wish I knew what had become of them.
In a corner stood a small Louis XVI vitrine. It contained a blown ostrich egg, a small opalescent flask made of Roman glass that had a strange bloom on the surface like that on a grape still on the vine, and several other small objects collected from the family’s travels.
On the mantel piece in the living room hung a tiny brass lamp. On the lid covering the oil chamber sits a tiny crudely cast mouse. It now hangs on my mantel.
In my living room is an Empire table of mahogany veneer in fairly deplorable condition. Desperate to recover some if its good looks, I took a steam iron to the blistered and cracked veneer on the top, stripped its clouded finish off, and refinished it. It's the only piece of furniture from my father’s Memphis forbears remaining after the Civil War.
As one advances in years, one accumulates possessions the way a caddis fly larva accumulates grit. The glue that makes us carry it all along with us is in a way self-secreted as well. However, it's psychic rather than physical — emotional rather than material.
Perhaps the most obvious example is a wedding band. There's a string of coral beads that belonged to a great-grandmother, samplers made by an ancestress of my husband’s in 1813, the parchment doctoral degree awarded to my father, the unsigned portrait of a three times great-grandfather and his wife, the wedding presents, military medals, camp swim trophies and school athletic medals.
Every home worthy of the name is blessed, however humble or luxurious it might be, with those things that recall what’s important to us. Souvenirs of holidays we might not remember without their presence on a shelf. Plaques to remind us of a time when someone close to us was important — to other people; dozens of special gifts, and numberless photographs.
Unless memories and tradition count as 'things," these concrete reminders are not just things. They're emblems. They’re absolute reminders — souvenirs in a literal sense — of what has happened in many lives, not just our own. As such, they serve as records that are apt to endure longer than any on paper.
So I choose to take a different attitude from that of my eminently practical and ordinarily completely unsentimental mother, and cherish and even show them off. I've begun a list of which items our children have mentioned or shown a fondness for so they may claim them. Daughters-in-law and granddaughters already have some antique jewelry. My daughter will get quite a bit more, much whose greatest value is that it was gifts to me from her father.
I try to take care of our "things." Like the priceless photos of my late husband, they offer a surprising degree of comfort on days when nothing else can.
©2014 Joan L. Cannon for SeniorWomen.com
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