Yeah – a first time for everything. I’m trying to get back into a blogging groove (both here and at the other place – where I have, incidentally, posted all my posts related to my 2008 trip to Rome)..and these memes are a good way to get there. For this 7 quick takes, I thought I’d share my 7 favorite items I’ve brought from my parents’ house – I haven’t brought much, but what I have, as they say, “speaks to me.” They are items that both match my own style (simple, color, not design-based, strong, not “pretty.”) and/or are suggestive of a time and place.
These glass mushrooms stood in our kitchen windows from some point in the 60′s on. Had to have them in mine.
I don’t remember this ever hanging anywhere in our house. I found it in the basement. My aunt (my dad’s sister) was really into needlework during the 60′s and 70′s, and lived in the Southwest, so I’m guessing this was made by her. I really love it. It’s so mod!
My mother was an artist. Unfulfilled and, well…enough about that. She did manage to do some larger pieces that I brought, but I really like this one the best – small, simple, suggestive.
She was also a theater major. This is a notebook she evidently had to do for a costume design class. I have it propped up and change the pages every now and then.
My parents were low-income academics during the 60′s (as were all academics at that time!) but from the beginning, despite the tight resources, they committed to buying one nice piece of art every year. One resource for people like my parents – people of moderate means seeking to expand their personal art collections - was Associated American Artists. My parents bought several pieces through them, including two Thomas Hart Benton prints. This is one.
The last time I was up there – two weeks ago – which I hope will be the last time I’m up there before a real estate closing occurs, I thought I was almost done – I thought I was done going through everything, thought I had found every single box that I needed to go through…when tucked away in a closet, I found not one, but…four boxes of…MY STUFF. Now, I had sort of been wondering where all of that had gone..and there it was. All my gee-gaws and knick-knacks and dolls that had decorated every room from Indiana to Knoxville from 1960-1978. It was tempting to take it all, but upon reflection, I decided that I really didn’t care all that much, it would just be a few more boxes sitting here in Birmingham..and someone would find it all in the estate sale and take great pleasure in scooping up this treasure of mid-century girlhood. So I just kept this one thing. Manageable, small – a kicky, bright little wooden pencil holder that I probably got in the mid-60′s. Sally Draper wants one, too.
Finally – this is the oddest thing of all, the least valuable, and the most valuable of all.
I always knew I would take this when it was time. There was no doubt. The last time I was up there, I considered whether I should take it then or just label it as “DO NOT SELL” for the estate sale and then retrieve it later. The risk was far too great, I decided, so I stuffed it in the back of my car and hauled it across Tennessee, southern Missouri, Arkansas, Mississippi, and back to Birmingham.
It’s a stepstool. That’s all. We’ve probably had it since the 70′s. But the role it played at my parents’s house was high chair. Every child of mine – every grandchild, from Chris, born in ’82 to Michael born in ’04 – sat at my parent’s kitchen table in that chair. Sometimes we’d turn it around and the back of the chair would function as a front rail to hold on to, and sometime it would face properly. But every one of them sat in it on visits, eating their morning cereal, their lgrilled cheese and lunch, and the hamburgers my dad cooked outside for dinner.
It’s beat up and dirty, but there’s no way I was going to let anyone else have it – if they wanted it.
And you know what? I expect that when I die…this just might be one of the items – one of the few – that there’s a fight over.
So what about you? What valueless, but immeasurably valuable items have you acquired?
For more Quick Takes, visit Conversion Diary!
Great treasure hunting at your parents’ house! I especially love your mom’s artwork!
The toucan cloth piece http://amywelborn.files.wordpress.com/2012/03/dsc_0631.jpg?w=500&h=331 looks like something my mother has; it was bought in Costa Rica and is the sort of thing the peasant women make there. It’s composed of layers of fabric, with cutouts. Another example:
http://onemorequilt.blogspot.com/2010/04/part-of-my-working-area-and-inspiration.html
I love #7 – it is not the things that are so important, but the memories that stretch out through the years far behind them. My favorite great-aunt died a couple years ago at the age of 95. Until a week before she died she was still living on her own in very rural southwestern Oklahoma in the same house she was born in, on the land her parents homesteaded; still driving to the store, weeding her flower garden, and cooking meals for everyone. She was childless, so she poured out her love on all her many nieces and nephews. She had a set of old, beat-up aluminum salt and pepper shakers that sat next to her stove and that she used in cooking every meal for at least the 50 years that I knew her. I can still see myself as a little girl sitting in her kitchen in the early morning, watching Aunt Lois make me a big southern breakfast. That set was the one special thing I took from her house, and now it sits next to my stove. Every time I pick one of them up to season food for my family, I am with her again.
Hi Amy,
Love that you are blogging again more frequently. Number 2 is called a Mola. They are made by the Cuna Indians in Panama. I had spent several months there and love their work.They are layers of fabric, as Dan pointed out, and sold in the City, at the various markets and street corners. They live in the San Blas islands in the Caribbean. Peace, Fr Brian
Love the mushrooms. I have a rusty mezza-luna knife that belonged to my great-grandfather, it reminds me of cooking in his kitchen and all that he taught me:)
I have had to learn the very hard way not to hold on to things too much. I have no idea what my dad has done with any stuff he had. My mom put things in storage and then couldn’t afford to pay the storage costs, so everything from my childhood is gone… pictures, dolls, furniture. Much of what I did have was lost in a basement flood. What is left that I treasure? I do have my mom’s children’s books (the ones she read and the ones she bought for us). My grandmother’s sofa (ca. 1930), much to my husband’s dismay. A painting my dad did at age eleven, of a cowboy escaping Indians – very vivid and showing the talent he had.
I am watching an elderly friend adjust to a much smaller living space – I have taken much of her furniture and don’t know what to do with it. She still treasures it and wants to pass it on to me and my children, but some is useless for now, except as a memory of her. Food for my garage, as I don’t feel free to give it away and my children don’t need it (yet).
I wish I were better at freeing myself of “stuff.”
Your mom did the exact number of paintings she was meant to do. It is hard to commit to art in a century in which Pollock paint drippings sell for millions. Number 3 above is intriguing and it’s vacant space is very Asian although Giotto did that too prior to Western paintings filling up the space. The sweep of the chair leg is precise and is the lady turning to warn me of wet shoes on my feet?
I recently saw a gallery open and close within weeks on the main boulevard of Hoboken where rents are steep thanks to Hoboken and part of Jersey City being residence satellites of Manhattan. Great pencil drawings of people filled half the gallery of a quality that would have made Michelangelo stop and look. Not enough buyers of art in the new tablet and gadget world. Your parents were the breed that kept small galleries open in the sixties and seventies and then the galleries slowly became part framing shops to stay open after that until the great nature artists of Mill Pond Press revived suburban gallery life out west. In the seventies, Greenwich Village in Manhattan was festooned with small galleries which are all gone now including one I was in on Bleecker. Your mom probably sensed it was a precarious living and when she saw Warhol’s Campbell Soup Can paintings getting rave reviews in the world of the 57th St. Galleries, she perhaps knew it was a dicey world to commit to despite exceptions like Andrew Wyeth.