Until last summer three packing boxes filled a hallway cubby
hole in my house. Inside them were family
pieces---silver and china---wrapped in recycled newsprint sheets left over from
my mother’s last move. At age
eighty-one, my mother had arrived from Oregon to spend, as it turned out, the
last decade of her life with me in Flint. Stevens Movers, a venerable Michigan company
and still full service, was lavish with paper.[1]
Two mature women joining into one household meant
duplication, decisions about which silver and china to save for “best”---to re-wrap
and put away. We held protracted parley
in the course of which my mother and I recalled family and events connected
with this stuff. In the end, each of us mooted
a case for this or that item and the rest was boxed, shoved into the hallway
cubby hole for later.
My mother died six years ago and I am back again to one life
in this Michigan house, not two. There
is no need to “save for good” anymore; future state occasions are unlikely or---let’s
face it---my participation in them is not assured.
Time for a different household philosophy.
I pulled out the boxes and opened one; out from their stiff
paper nests and into my life tumbled objects I remembered that my mother always
identified by their original owner’s name or a past event. Burgundy colored felt rolls unfurled, their
soft pockets releasing silver teaspoons, pearl handled forks, napkin rings that
clattered onto the table. Vestiges of elegant
dining in my grandmothers’ time.
Pearl-handled cutlery still seems a bit over the top for a
kitchen drawer. Those pieces were tucked
back into their rolls, their grosgrain ribbons retied, but the silver teaspoons
have entered my daily life. A set of six:
their handles are engraved with the letter “V”---the first initial of my
maternal grandmother’s new married surname---and probably a wedding gift. The script grapheme lays gracefully in the
oval blank toward the top of the tip. I
decided to use them every day.
My grandmother, Esther Wilkins, was married in Caldwell,
Idaho, on February 15, 1912. The wedding
date is engraved in the bowl of a different teaspoon in the felt role, a commemorative
piece. Esther was thirty-two when she
married, a bit beyond youthful prime.
She had been sent out west from Indiana because of poor health. She lived to eighty-eight. Her maternal uncle, George Little, was a
judge in Caldwell, a respected town figure and a family man with wife Flora and
children, Edna and Wesley. [2] What year my grandmother arrived, I cannot
say. Decades later, she still corresponded
with “cousin Edna.”
Esther worked in a bank in Caldwell and earned her own
money. She liked nice things and
remembered proudly how she ordered gloves and shoes from Chicago. Old
photographs show her with three other young ladies, all in puffy white
shirtwaists, their long dark skirts billowing in the wind. The ladies clutch their broad brimmed hats as
they pose in front of a house in glaring sunlight. No other buildings can be seen.
Idaho territory was admitted to the Union in 1890. Besides farming or ranching, gold and gem
mining lured prospectors there and Esther relished adventure. She told of suitor who took her on an
excursion to the gold mines. He gave her
a gold nugget that she had made into a pin.
But back to the spoons.
The pattern is Wallace “Violet,” first issued in 1904.[3] The design has the sentimental sweetness of
many flower patterns I’ve viewed online, unlike formal designs available in the
Edwardian era.[4] They give tactile pleasure---their handles
fit comfortably in my fingers; the bowl is deep. The spoon has “balance”---its
tip and foot rest evenly on the table.
Stories about my grandmother come to my mind each day when I
use her teaspoons. But my strong attachment
to objects and their stories also complicated my life. My
Catholic schooling cautioned us impressionable girls that “worldly goods” were inferior
things, dead weight that kept you from rising to spiritual heights.
Equally powerful was my family’s adherence to social propriety.
Acquisitiveness was a double whammy:
both ill-mannered and a sign of weak character. “Greedy Mae,” my mother would chide me---or some
unsuspecting child who took the last cookie on a plate. I imagine that my grandmother Esther must have
called her that. My mother was acquisitive
too.
My attachment to things is inherited.
As an only child I spent hours observing things---household
objects, clothing, accessories, furniture and all their intriguing shapes and
textures---while adults talked. I
observed people too, but objects did not move around or stare back at me,
interrupt my gaze and question me. Objects
were silent as I was, complicit and, so I thought, waiting for me to inspect
them more closely.
All this childhood peering at stuff might serve some higher purpose
for a future artist, a painter or sculptor, a craftsman or perhaps a physicist,
even a collector. I can say in my
defense, however, that long observation of objects led me to observation of
people and sharpened my intuition.
Decades later in Poland, I met an elderly lady helped me
learn Polish while I did small household tasks for her in return. She lived in one of the cinderblock apartment
buildings of the time. The flat was two rooms, a bathroom, and a windowless
kitchen; in the first postwar decades people were grateful to get one. A
Biedermeier cherry armoire covered half of one wall; its rosy, reddish-brown
wood warmed the bleakness of the room.
I was instructed to serve her tea, placing the sole silver
teaspoon in the household on her saucer.
Relatives, she said, had been deported to Siberia; a spoon was the most
valuable item one could have. Armoire
and teaspoon, relics large and small of a time when objects of daily life were beautiful
and useful. In times of calamity, life
sustaining.
Shortly after my grandmother’s teaspoons entered my kitchen,
I read Susanna Moore’s “The Life of Objects.” [5]
On the eve of World War II, Beatrice
Palmer leaves Ireland for Berlin to work in the aristocratic Metzenberg household.
She enters a German family with Jewish
connections where generations of wealth and taste have amassed a significant art
collection. From tapestries, sculptures,
and porcelain, to stationery and cigarette holders, all manner of objects
bespeak refinement. Beatrice learns the
German term, vorzügliche:
exquisite. Her cultural education occurs
as the Metzenbergs flee to their country estate. Disdainful of Hitler, unable
to abandon their heritage, they sell or barter their possessions for food and
safety. Eventually the Metzenberg world
crumbles under Allied bombing and Russian pillage. Beatrice survives, more educated and
perceptive, and without regret as she says, “having passed through fire and
into selfhood.”[6]
No fires of war singed me into selfhood. My young education
occurred in a peaceful time---idyllic as I recollect it now. The objects that entranced my gaze were minor
in comparison to those described in Susanna Moore’s novel. Still, the fate of objects is to break or
scatter, to be cut loose from their settings as their owners’ lives
dissolve. I write to evoke the fragments
of my grandmother’s life that some silver teaspoons represent to me.
Other stuff remains; two of the three boxes returned to the cubby
hole this summer. Next year, I’ll pull
them out again. Just now I’m still not
ready tackle the china, but I think I’ll take another look at those napkin
rings.
Read more essays like this in East Village Magazine athttp://www.eastvillagemagazine.org/
Read more essays like this in East Village Magazine athttp://www.eastvillagemagazine.org/
[3] According
to Wikipedia, Wallace “grew to be the largest manufacturer of flat tableware in
the world. At the start of the 20th century, about 3 tons of steel and 1.5 tons
of nickel silver were used daily. The company opened selling houses in New York
and Chicago.”
[4] The
teaspoons are not the full 6-inch size that would be part of a full place
setting. They are the “5 o’clock” size: 5 and 3/8 inches, designed for tea---extra
teaspoons usable for any occasion.
[6]
Claire Messud, The New York Review of Books, Feb. 7,
2013.
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