odds and ends

I carried off several things from my mother's house. Most are of a practical nature, such as her Tupperware kitchen storage containers, two pounds of pinto beans, three pounds of white rice, and a five-pound bag of Martha White Corn Meal. A few have more of a lasting connection:

- A treadle sewing machine that had been my great-grandmother's; this was the only significant item. Mrs. C. was bemused when I arrived home with it, observing that "it needs a lot of work," but she put it in our bedroom beside her grandmother's sewing cabinet.

- A long-handled scythe that my grandfather used to mow hay. It, too, would need a lot of work, being rusty and dull, and the century-old handle (hickory? ash?) might not be up to regular use. But there it is, sitting in our storage unit. I have absolutely no practical use for it.

- A walking stick. On the last full day that I was there, I undertook a little task that had nagged at me for a couple of years; a sapling (Juglans nigra) had grown up through the branches of the apple tree, and with neglect was now some twelve or fourteen feet tall. I sawed it down, and decided that the bottom part of it would make a fine walking stick, straight for five feet with a nice crook at the top where I trimmed off the branches. Being black walnut, it will be sturdy. It has character, reminding me of Gandalf's staff and, much more than that, reminding me of the soil from which it grew. It, too, sits in our storage unit.

Several books:

- A Bible, in the Authorized King James Version, large print with the words of Jesus in red. It is fairly new; I gave it to Mother perhaps ten or fifteen years ago and it is not heavily used (though neither is it un-used). She wrote what she could recall of our family tree in the front pages of it. I am reaching the age where a large-print Bible will be welcome, so I have made this my principal Bible for home use, adding her death to the list of dates and names. Someday mine will join them.

- A Girl Scout Handbook from the 1930's, which she used in starting and leading a Scout troop; I alluded to this in the previous entry. In those days, the Girl Scout and Boy Scout handbooks were considerably more useful than their modern equivalents, where safety and political correctness rule.

- A book of poetry. When I visited her in August, she wanted her "old book of poems." She described it, but I could not find it in the house, nor could my sister. Mother had forgotten to add that it was no longer a "book," but a collection of loose pages in a plain manila envelope. We found it while cleaning out the house, too late for Mother to have for a final visit with these verses as she had desired. Many carry handwritten dates from her early teens, probably memorization assignments. It tends toward eighteenth and nineteenth century authors now out of fashion, such as Whittier, Emerson, Riley, and Longfellow, plus many whose names are entirely unknown to me. Of nineteenth century American poets whose popularity has remained, there is but little: one by Poe, one by Whitman ("O Captain, my Captain") and nothing by Emily Dickinson. There is a fair amount of Burns, a handful of snippets from Shakespeare such as the Soliloquy from "Hamlet," and a selection of political documents at the end: the Gettysburg Address, the Declaration of Independence, Patrick Henry's "Give me liberty or give me death" speech, and the Ten Commandments (which, in those days, were considered as foundational of American thought as these other documents). The book is, as mentioned, entirely fallen to pieces.

So should every worthwhile book be, by the time it has accompanied us through a lifetime.