Days 169-175: Heirlooms

I visited my mother-in-law over Thanksgiving and noticed looking around her house that so many of her things aren't just things. They are connections to her past, things representing a part of her history. All around are the valuables of people she valued...old quilts, letters, aged photos, antique toys, passed-down furniture. Her treasures now...their treasures then. Heirlooms.

One of the first tapes I owned was from Amy Grant and on that album was a song called just that- Heirlooms. Around the age of 12 I wore out the ribbon on that tape in a lavender boom box that sat beside my bed atop a retro TV tray. The lyrics of Heirlooms hearken back in time, to memories stirred anew at the discovery of forgotten family letters and photographs tucked away in a dusty attic. On her knees and enveloped in a sense of timelessness, the songwriter sifts through memories and faces and laughter and tears. And emerging from tattered and moth-eaten boxes she finds in her ancestry a sense of identity and belonging.

I remember just after high school being at a yard sale with my grandmother, about a year before she died. I was about to launch out on my first year away from home and we were rummaging for all manner of things I'd need to set up shop in an Oklahoma dorm room 2,000 miles away. We walked away from that yard sale with many things but what I remember the most are two embroidered pillowcases that I have to this day. I never saw her buy them but later, as I was about to drive off to the great Midwest in my 1990 bright yellow Mustang, she gave them to me. They were tucked in a little white box with a small scrap of paper that had these words scratched upon it: "To my sweet Granddaughter, dream sweet dreams..." And now, two decades later, when I look at those pillowcases I don't so much see the pillowcases. I see the "yes, you can" and the "yes, you are" of a nurturing grandmother. I see, as the song says, "all that I come from, and all that I live for, and all that I'm going to be..."

Looking around the room now, I see a myriad of family photos, a handmade clock from my Grandpa, a wooden bowl crafted by my brother-in-law, and a jewelry box made by my husband on our first anniversary. Just a few things that are my treasures now, and perhaps, one day, heirlooms for another. Then and now, they represent connection. Mere physical things, they embody much more than the scraps from which they're made. Within them, are stories worth telling and worth knowing.

(The pillowcases from my grandmother.)

(Letters, valentines, quilts, toys and photos from my mother-in-laws home. )