The cedar chest

 

Welcome back to the mom blog.

Its return coincides with a milestone: my mother's fourth move of a lifetime, this time to an independent living complex that offers three meals a day; a movie theater; hair salon; and a daily happy hour where the two-drink maximum is irrelevant since her first glass of wine had to be diluted twice.

Upon recently leaving the Philadelphia apartment where she lived alone for nearly 10 years, my mother separated her possessions into those that would go with her and others to a flea market. 

Why not make money if you're shedding stuff you don't need? 

She insisted on her children taking some items she couldn't bear to throw out given the history and emotion associated with them, but also minor things that had no business in our homes either: a garlic press, an oval-shaped soft-boiled egg holder and a box of Bisquick.   

She worries what will happen to her most precious possessions: containers of sticky photo albums marking christenings, birthdays, graduations, holidays, weddings. My brother hauled those out and we will deal with them at a later date. 

But of all the things she looked through in the last month, one had the resonance of a lifetime's history: her cedar chest, gifted to her by my grandparents when she was a teenager.

More than 70 years of memories ago. 

As we were growing up, the chest was a vault of curiosities, made more tantalizing because we weren't allowed to look inside. There was a key, but my mom hid it well. So only with her new transition was I allowed a peek.

There were formal documents, booklets charting her six children's growth over the years and some report cards that bore her name or my dad's. (His was the easier signature to forge if we wanted to conveniently hide disappointing marks.)  

There was her will and testament, a DNR order, some jewelry - including a diamond ring she never returned to her first fiance - and documents related to her investments. For a woman who managed to save what was left of my father's lean paycheck every week after the needs of five kids were met, those are a point of pride.  

But there were other things harder to look at: I won't go into them here, but suffice it to say it was better to have seen them as an adult than as a befuddled child or teenager. They recorded things both happy and sad, but what long lifetime doesn't leave such a paper trail?

Now, the chest will stay in the family, waiting for new memories to fill it. But not the diamond engagement ring. 

That one isn't going anywhere.   

   





                                                                  

 

     



  


        


   


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