Sorting Through the Memories

For the last several days I’ve been working myself to exhaustion sorting through, photographing, cataloging, and packing my mother’s possessions. The picture above is of a lot of miscellaneous brass and other metal objects. At the upper left are a number of Victorian brass candlesticks my mother bought forty years ago. At the upper right is the gilt metal desk set my dad had on the desk in his law office. Judging by the style I think it’s possible that it belonged to my great-grandfather, a justice of the peace. In the center are some small, mostly Oriental brass cups and incense burners that probably belonged to my dad’s mother.

These are a number of pieces of handpainted china that belonged to my father’s grandmother. There’s an amusing story that goes along with these. Back in the late 19th and early 20th centuries handpainting china was a common pastime among women of my great-grandmother’s social class and ethnic group and she belonged to a sort of club in which she and some of her friends would meet and handpaint china. Then they’d play euchre using the dishes as chips or prizes. Judging from the amount of handpainted china we have, much of it painted by someone other than my great-grandmother, she may not have been much at painting china but she was hell for euchre.

The metal is worn, dented, and broken. Some of the china has chips and cracks. I, too, am worn and dented and I have a few chips and cracks myself.

Soon my siblings and I will begin dividing these things among us. Their value really isn’t that much but they’re full of memories for me and I want to capture the sight of these things and recall the memories they evoke before they disappear from view. Now I am custodian of the stories.