I’ve never met an embroidered fabric that wasn’t magnificent.
Perhaps that’s a past-life echo, or maybe embroidery is a disappearing art and therefore deserves love, or it could be my inner old-lady is louder than yours. I love embroidered fabric, especially hand sewn monogrammed handkerchiefs. I haven’t seen one in years.
But is it worth actual money, to buy used (clean) handkerchiefs? As much as I may think so, I can see why someone else may not. There’s just something about lace and fine threads.
I’ve enjoyed wandering around old things since I could wander. My family went to estate auctions, yard sales, and flea markets. If you haven’t explored the vast extravaganza of a Southern American flea market circa 1989, you’ve not seen the stuff dreams (and nightmares) are made of.
My experience with what most would call heirlooms is limited, which is to say my recent ancestors had nothing resembling estates, or items of value, because we’re from the rural South. We were, by most averages, lower middle class, for many generations. But we got by, and we were resourceful. Every day I am grateful for the work put in to make ends meet for my grandparents, my parents, and me and my siblings. The remnants of these past lives are mostly in memories.
Every now and again I indulge the nostalgia and wander through my own past.
Some of the things that I would love to have, because they are centerpieces of memories:
My grandfather’s pipe, which held cherry tobacco, was solid, purposeful, and the only tobacco pipe I ever saw. I was maybe four the last time I saw him smoke it. Before I knew of fear, consequences, and how lungs worked— I knew I loved that scent, and that pipe was an art piece.
His ashtrays, all of them— some fights are long fought, and often fraught with what’s good for the body versus what’s good for the mind. So often that battle rages, and when my grandfather passed away from a heart attack that could be correlated with the smoking he did his whole adult life, my grandmother seems to have done away with anything that held evidence of his killer. Can’t say I blame her, not one bit.
My grandmother’s miniature perfumes, miniature Avon lipsticks— all the tiny things I never saw her use, but she kept tucked in her spaces where she must have felt pretty. I never realized what a privilege it was to share these intimate tiny things, just to get to see them. I miss these little things.
On that order, my grandmother’s powder room, which was my aunt and mom’s bathroom as teenagers, smelled like heaven—powdery, indecipherably feminine, clean— heaven. I can call up the perfumey scent and the golden wheat details of the bathroom, part of a house long sold, once kept by a beautiful woman, now long gone. She kept a gold plated, filigree-laden handheld mirror in there, presumably to check the back of her hair. She was never anything less than put together every time I saw her. I’d like to have that mirror, see if I can’t catch a glimpse of the memory.
Many things are lost to time, as it is the all-consuming and ever present threat to life lived in this moment and now passed. But I hope to honor the lost relics, in memory and in word, because the little things I carry will always reflect parts of myself and those who made me.
What pieces in time have you kept in your heart?
Did you get to hold on to any of them?