soapboxdiner

What's found in a cedar chest

The folks just got back from a trip to Montana. A trip to collect family heirlooms, treasures and trinkets from a past that is still remembered, washing us all in nostalgia, warmth, awe and tears.

My grandmother's old bible with telling clippings left as bookmarks of her life's events as well as her thoughts, the words she sought for solace. Pieces of history that she brought to and kept between God and herself. In it, a sacred notation scrawled in her hand, "God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference."

Delicate doilies my great grandmother Flossie, born 1891, knit by hand in the evenings of her youth. Quilts my grandmother patched together in sure, even stitches from scraps of old fabric using nothing but her deft fingers, a needle and some thread. Embroideries. Recipes.

And now these things are passed down to us, my mother and her children. Momentos and records of the women that make up pieces of who I am. I honor these living ghosts, the hours and days and years they represent out of my foremothers' lives.

What did these women think in the evening hours they spent making these beautiful, utilitarian things for their families? These beautiful hand made things crafted not as precious treasures but as necessities. Quietly made not as the art we now frame to hang on our walls, but utilitarian items of daily life. How far they are now removed from those humble but thoughtfully crafted beginnings. And if so insignificant a thing as a blanket means so much, how much more valuable were the intangible? Those things that have faded now out of mind and consequence?

I think of where we are as women now. How much we say we've gained. But I look at all these priceless things and wonder how much we, our progeny, and posterity has lost. What of ours will grown children come to collect when what we invest our lives in building are merely careers and pensions?

10:39 am - 09.15.02
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