“You have to keep this,” my mother says, walking into the
guest room. She pounces on listeners
this way, with no warning or prelude.
She holds up a mixing bowl tinted like canned peas mashed with
milk. “This may not look like much to
you, but it's precious to me.”
“I know.” I look
at the bowl. I recognize the Jadeite
Depression Glass only because she been explaining her
collection of bowls, plates, and lemon juicers for years. I turn back to the email I'm writing to my
son on her computer, trying to sort out who will meet me at the Portland train station in
several days. I hope my brief glance at
the bowl is enough.
I've never understood her fascination for glassware
manufactured during the Great Depression.
She was born during the same era, but has no nostalgia for what she's
always described as a “wretched childhood”:
a mother who feigned illness and vilified those closest to her, a father
who left with another woman. What does
she see in the bowl? A mother who whipped up meringues rather than an
occasional batch of burnt eggs spiced with venom?
“I just like it,” she tells me now. “And it is worth something.”
“I know,” I say, glancing at her and then typing some
more. Next to the computer, I'd already
seen her notes listing the value of each piece.
Her health is fine, but she's embraced the task of preparing for death
like a new hobby, earmarking how belongings she and my stepfather have
accumulated will pass down to their children.
“I'll probably never use it,” I say, sending my email and facing
her. “Feel free to give it to someone
who would. But if you really want me to
keep it, I'll try to find a place for it.”
“Oh Liz,” she says.
I'm her only biological daughter and less interested in her collections
than my three step-sisters. She shows
me the bottom of the bowl and tells me once again the history of Fire King and
Anchor Hocking trademarks. Knowing how
she likes to explain things, I let her go on.
I suppress a yawn, but she catches it.
“I know you don't collect things. I do it because my mother never let me keep
the things I love.”
I'm not sure what those things were. Our habit of skirting around the emotions of
family history has calcified. My
mother's mother, Bertha, left deep scars on both of us. Abandoned by my father and employed
full-time, Mom invited her mother to move from Louisville
to Seattle to
help raise me. We both know she had
little choice. I both resent and feel
guilty about resenting Mom's need to put me under Bertha's daily care. Mom knew better than anyone the damage Bertha
could inflict. She's apologized many
times: I always figured Mother liked you more than she liked me. I always respond: Well, she didn't.
“Come here.” Mom
smiles and curls her finger. I sign off
my Yahoo account and follow. She points
to some paintings in the guest room. They're among many paintings in the Whidbey Island house hung with little care or
beauty. All I see in them is a reminder
of my natural inheritance: a knack for making collected objects look like
clutter rather than design. Mom reminds
me how she and her best friend Lee each bought an oil from the same New Orleans artist (whose
name I can never remember) with no knowledge of the other's purchase. Lee died several years ago, leaving her painting
to my mother.
“You have to keep them both. Don't ever separate them.”
I appreciate the history.
I loved Lee too. I scan the
thick, oily brush strokes hardened into impressions of moss drooping from trees
and magenta blossoms spilling over a wrought-iron balcony. They portray a sweltering place that would
wilt my mother and me in minutes. We're
lovers of cool mountain and ocean air, not humid
bayous.
“Alright.” I shrug, confident
my mother has many years left.
I've
already received other family heirlooms Mom insists I keep. One is Grandpa's Death Blanket. Even she calls it that. It's a small quilt my Stepfather's mother
stitched after her husband died.
I have fond memories of Grandma and Grandpa visiting our
summer home on Orcas
Island. Grandpa took me and my stepsisters
fishing. Grandma pulled blackberry
cobblers out of the oven to welcome us back.
Every summer, I anticipated the visit of these archetypal grandparents
from Pratt, Kansas.
Grandma lived into her nineties, surviving Grandpa by
about twenty years. In her final years
of failing eyesight and hearing, she spent hours listing who among her
grandchildren, step-grandchildren, and adopted grandchildren would inherit her
belongings. A devout Protestant, she had
a fierce sense of fairness and treated us all equally. I did not look forward to the death that
would bring me an inheritance but could imagine nostalgia for whatever Grandma
chose to pass on. After her death, I
received a package that included Grandma's handmade quilt. Even if not the elaborate Bear Paws, Texas
Stars, or Missouri Daisies of skilled artists, the quilts I had always imagined
model grandmothers making and passing down at least had color. But Grandma forged her own design. She stitched the quilt with large square
blocks cut from Grandpa's work clothes.
It exhibits variations in pattern – solids, plaids, and checks - but
only one color scheme: mostly brown with some black and gray. Perhaps it reminded Grandma of the rich life
she shared with her no-nonsense husband.
But to me, it shouts death. It's moldering leaves, not the silver-blue water where
Grandpa and I dropped our fishing lines.
It's the damp earth of a freshly dug grave, not blackberries that
stained my fingers in those happy summers.
I keep the Death Blanket but hide it at the back of a basement closet.
I have more freedom – and more reason --to dispose of
heirlooms from my father's side. My
father died of a heart attack in Baltimore
in his early 60s, leaving his latest girlfriend with his estate: a dilapidated
motor home and an urn of ashes. I felt
fortunate not to inherit any debt from him and relieved that his remains stayed
with someone who would revere them, not fantasize wicked ways to discard them.
Several years after her son's death, Grandmother
Charlotte showed me a set of china that once belonged to him. “You can have it when I die,” she told me
during my last visit to her Salem
apartment. She talked more with me
during that visit than ever before, explaining how my father had bought the
china when stationed in Japan
during the Korean War. On his return,
he'd left it with his mother and never retrieved it. He acquired and abandoned me in a similar
way. I didn't know I had a father until
I was five and then knew him as someone who brought his anger around and then
disappeared again.
Grandmother Charlotte died several months after that
visit. I kept the china for a few
years. I used it on Thanksgiving and
Christmas. A single mother, I tried to
create some sense of family continuity for my young son. But he had that on his Nepalese father's
side, with extended family and unconditional love both here and abroad. My father had never tried to meet his first
grandson. He never sent a birthday
card. Why hang on to his abandoned
china? Besides, I didn't like the shiny
green on white pattern, the bowls too shallow to hold a hearty soup, and the
metallic gold trim incompatible with a microwave. I broke a few pieces over the years and
discovered a perverse pleasure in those accidents. Rather than indulge a vengeful streak I
feared I had inherited from Bertha, I donated the remaining china to a
second-hand store.
Loyalty will require me to keep each heirloom Mom
bequeaths. I'd like to appreciate them
more. I am beginning to see how we share
similar reasons for clinging to what we do.
I suspect my mother treasures Depression Glass
to tell herself a story of how life could be -- not the grand stories that
crystal or silver might tell -- just the lore of regular families, the kind she
longed for. Although I don't find them
in green bowls, I also stockpile stories and try to weave them into a past
worthy of nostalgia. I hear the tales I
crave in bold names: Lucinda Jane,
Garnet Palm -- great grandmothers on my father's side. I know little about them, but they connect me
to the place I call home: the Pacific Northwest. I sometimes whisper their names like
poems. I think about the few places in
the Northwest where my ancestors left records behind: Jacksonville, Oregon where Garnet Palm was born in 1878; Spokane
where Lucinda Jane married in 1903, Salem Pioneer
Cemetery holding the
remains of John Enslin and others. I ponder the snatches of stories I do know:
a great-grandfather who worked the Portland shipyards at the end of World War
I, my Grandfather who built a house near the Willamette River in West Salem and
died in his thirties of a brain hemorrhage, my widowed Grandmother Charlotte
picking berries in summer and working the canneries in winter to support her
five children. I remember the kindness
of my Uncle George, who because of mild mental retardation spent most of his
childhood years at Oregon Fairview Home -- a notorious institution founded in
1907 for the care of the “feeble-minded,” “idiotic,” and “epileptic”
and remembered by many as a place of forced sterilizations, lax care, and
prison-like housing. Yearning for
ancestral connections to place, I cling to this moth-eaten, rat-gnawed quilt of
my father's family history. I imagine it
has more colors than Grandpa's death blanket, but I'll never know what they
are.
Mom and I finish
the tour of paintings and glassware and move onto jewelry. I've seen most of it many times, but she
purchases new tanzanite or zircon through the shopping channel every few
months. I don't like these generic
jewels. I like the necklaces,
bracelets, and earrings she fashioned from old costume jewelry. Of little monetary value, they're what make
me ache for my childhood.
I remember industrious evenings Mom and I spent in the
weeks leading up to Christmas. Although
tired from her clerical work, Mom always found time for crafts then. She taught me to weave ribbon into birds so
colorful and animated I imagined them taking flight. We glued doilies, sequins,
fake gemstones, and glitter on bald globe ornaments. Now every Christmas, I unwrap the tacky
heirlooms from the seventies era napkins that still protect them and hang each
on a prominent tree limb.
I never moved beyond rudimentary gluing, knitting, or
sewing, but Mom's craft has evolved. I
am most impressed with her bead-weaving.
Worsening arthritis makes brick, peyote, and picot stitching with small
beads painful, but she persists. She's
sent me samples over the years. I've
admired the craft in all but wished for designs other than Santa Claus earrings
or dainty necklaces. One Christmas, she
honored my request for something more “funky” – our code word for my eclectic
tastes in ethnic and second-hand clothing.
The result is my favorite pair of earrings: fringed tubular dangles like
cuttlefish shimmering dark greens and purples.
I tell her how much I love her bead-weaving. She opens a drawer to reveal another
collection of tanzanite. I can't bear
any more. I know what I must do.
“Mom? Can you teach me how to
string beads?
She still has to show me the rest of her tanzanite, but
she rushes through. We spend the next
two days in companionable work. Once
again, she is my teacher and I her student.
Together, we string a legacy both of us can value.
END