Treasures or Trash?

One of my father's favorite jokes:

"This is the  hatchet that George Washington used to chop down the cherry tree. The handle has only been replaced five times and the head has only been replaced twice."

I thought of that when I heard a story on NPR the other day about an art exhibit featuring things seen and not seen. The artist described several installations, one of which was an ordinary podium that he had taken to a witch to be cursed. He was interested in how that story affected the way people were willing to interact with the podium  ---- would they be hesitant to touch it? Be afraid? Be brave? Scoff?

The meaning of objects is always of interest to me. Our house is a virtual museum ---- or curio shop, depending on your point of view. We have one room dedicated to the preservation of family antiques. The chairs and marble topped table belonged to my great-grandparents and are about 150 years old. The secretary was one that mom and I found almost 40 years ago in a used furniture barn in England. Two sets of dishes occupy the corner cabinet, several shelves contain books dating as far back as the 1830s.

Now "antiques" ---- bona-fide old stuff --- have some intrinsic worth of their own. These pieces have the added layer of family history. I have photographs of these chairs in front of the fireplace at Edgewood Farm on the west end of Albia, in the house that my great-great grandfather built. Photos, books, paintings, furniture, dishes, all have the meaning invested in them by the stories that are attached. If we were to abandon this house today POOF! just like that, someone might come in and find monetary value in some of it, but they wouldn't know the people, the stories that make them come alive.

And it's not just the antiques. In fact, I'm almost more interested in what happens to things that I attach value to, that nobody else would. I spent the day cleaning the upstairs room which I refer to variously as my writing room, my studio, my refuge, the guest room, and lately as Buddy's room. He's pretty much taken it over.  It is filled with things that have meaning for me, but probably would be Goodwill truck to somebody else. I know where the hideous clock came from and why it's there. I know why there's a tin ear horn on the bookshelf. Those are the Tarot cards I bought in San Francisco, the cat statue that Ashley gave me, the broken silver-plated bank that was a baby gift from a special friend. Four shelves full of books would likely not be of more than passing interest to anybody else, but some of them I've had since I was a kid, some were instrumental in my awakening as a young radical feminist in college, or spoke to my longing for beautiful prose or pure entertainment, or professional development. For me, they have meaning beyond the words they contain.

A lot of this makes it difficult for me to throw things away. I know that the very ordinary cup in the kitchen was the one that Jill made me coffee in every morning when she was still living in the duplex. She has a barrel glass that belonged to her grandmother. It would fetch a dime at a yard sale, but for her it's priceless.

I know my years of owning things are diminishing. As I grow closer to the end of my life, I'll try to find worthy homes for the most valuable of my possessions, the ones that carry not only a dollar value, but family history. We'll inevitably have to downsize more than once over the next fifteen or twenty years. I hope I can be graceful about letting things go since I obviously can't take them with me. I've seen my grandparents do it, then my parents ---- that's how I wound up with a lot of this stuff. I guess I'm a conduit for passing these things along. But nothing lasts forever does it? And someday, some descendant will pick up my grandmother's collection of photo postcards and say "I don't know who any of these people are." and they'll all wind up in the trash, right along with my AA chips and the Christmas ornaments I made when I was too poor to buy any.

A cursed podium? George Washington's hatchet? The baby basket I bought in Morocco? All moving down the chute, meaningless in the end.