Greetings, friends. (XLVIII)

Greetings, friends. Today I’d like to talk about some things we are definitely not keeping.

My mother was extremely sentimental, which is where I get it from, because my father is decidedly not so. In spite of me and Adah referring to her as that woman with a roll of the eyes, while we dig through her immense stash of belongings, the reality is that she kept many things because they had meaning for her.

Some of those items are meaningful to others, which is why some of the replica clothing and most of the replica furniture are going to museums, while the rest of the reenacting kit is going to people our mother knew in that community. Some are meaningful to me and my sister, like the roughly half cubic yard of Burnston and Aronowsky family photos.

Other items were meaningful to my mother alone, like a box I found containing greeting cards expressing best wishes from her living history museum buddies at places like the Colonial Pennsylvania Plantation, when our family moved to New Hampshire. Some of the cards are very effusive.

A typewritten letter from one J. Mervyn Harris, under the letterhead Nether Providence Township Tricentennial Commission, reads, in part:

In the short time I have known you, I have developed a deep appreciation of your knowledge and your ability to impart that knowledge to others. Your in-depth understanding of the Plantation’s time period has been of inestimable value. Without many of our programs would not exist with the high degree of accuracy they enjoy today. Your love of scholarship and your unselfish willingness to share your learning has made us an outstanding institution.

Most of the other encomiums are less formal, and more personal, but no less heartfelt.

In the same box, I also found a scrapbook album that I assume my mother intended for a permanent archive of these farewell greetings. The scrapbook was empty and unused. Ah, Mom. The best laid schemes o’ mice and men.

Adah and I are not keeping this kind of thing. We are finding plenty of happy mementos of our mother that have a more personal connection to us individually. Adah does not have the room in her house and I do not have the room in my truck.

Today Adah found a letter from our grandmother Lenore to our mother Sharon, evidently in response to a poem that Mom had written about me and shared with her mother.

I will tell you that today I find being the subject of my late mother’s blank verse extremely uncomfortable to say the least. My grandmother’s brief missive includes phrases that indicate to me that she was trying to find a polite way to avoid saying that she didn’t think much of the poem either. “I can’t really respond verbally about it,” she wrote, “It went very deeply… it will take a long time to jell.”

I threw the letter away. Adah shrugged. We have enough happy mementos of our maternal ancestors. I don’t need to keep every last scrap with their handwriting on it.

But finding things like the letter from J. Mervyn Harris, and talking with the Ladies about their memories of our mother, puts in focus who she was to a select group of people. I find it very satisfying to hear other people describe her as knowledgable and generous. It puts the anger and exasperation I have towards her over the final years of her life, and the aftermath, into a little perspective.

I have been slowly working my way through another thing we are definitely not keeping, which is my mother’s stash of fruit preserves. Much as she experimented with traditional dye techniques, my mother also loved colonial-era cooking and food preservation practices.

One of the first things we did after the funeral was go through her kitchen and throw away everything perishable. Any store-bought food items we found that were sealed, and not past their expiration date, we boxed up and took to the synagogue for the winter holiday food drive.

But there were a few items that were sealed but not store-bought, such as a bottle labeled “hard cyder” (sic) from 2003. The contents were most assuredly brewed from the fruits of the apple orchard by the house, and then pressed on the old-timey apple press in the barn. I attempted to open the bottle and the cork snapped off. I dug the rest of the cork out. The contents had probably been vinegar for a decade. I poured it down the sink.

But I did find a few Mason jars in the fridge of fruit preserves, labeled with contents and date. As with Granddad’s beef jerky, I am not one to let homemade food go to waste simply because the maker has shuffled off this mortal coil. Since my pre-diabetic diagnosis, I have tried to eschew large quantities of sweets, so I especially like a spoonful of jam in my Greek-style yogurt.

The jars came open cleanly. There was no mold or any sign of bacterial growth. They passed the sniff test. I have a robust constitution.

I liked the low-sugar strawberry rhubarb from 2014 best of all, as you can see. The apple marmalade from 2015 was a little lacking in flavor, but not bad. The 2014 etrog (i.e. citron) marmalade was… you know, fine. They were all still 100% edible. And a spoonful of any of these eight or nine year old preserves beats the heck out of plain unflavored yogurt.

Alena came over today with Maddie from the American Independence Museum in Exeter. We are considering donating a replica quilted petticoat, one of Mom’s magnum opera representing many hundreds of hours of work, and a large quantity of furniture and dining ware to the museum, for the benefit of the visiting public.

While we were taking inventory, Alena noticed the empty strawberry-rhubarb jar in the kitchen, and alerted me to a previously unexplored cabinet containing many more such jars.

Not shown in this photo is a jar of quince marmalade that is old enough to do an aliyah and become bar mitzvah. Why my mother was keeping on a dozen jars of fruit preserves, not one less than seven years old, and what she was saving them for, is beyond me. We keep these things because we’ve had them forever.

I am not at all sure what to do with them. I cannot possibly eat them all in the next month. Adah won’t. I am definitely not taking them with me.

I suggested we offer them to the open house visitors this weekend. As Adah observed, “My husband is food safety certified, and I can assure you he wouldn’t touch them.”

What do we keep these things for? Jennifer, an old friend of the family, messaged me after I started journaling to offer me a carefully preserved quilt that our mother made as a gift for her parents’ wedding.

I thanked her for the offer, and assured her that we already had a surplus of handmade goods by my mom. I asked her if I could make a suggestion. What I said was:

“That quilt is just taking up space in storage, and my mother would have wanted it to be used. Please haul it out and wash it if necessary and actually use it for a quilt. If it's too ugly to keep around the house, maybe it should go to charity.”

“My mother saved all these precious things for... what? A rainy day? And all it ever amounted to was an endless burden of crap that someone had to keep track of and deal with. Better to wear it out to bare threads or give it away than to leave it in a box.”

I took another couple truckloads of clothing to Goodwill this week. Before I did, I was given pause by a message from Celeste — who never had the privilege of meeting my mother — saying she would be honored to have a handmade item from my mother, if there were any such.

In fact there were. In the early ‘80s, as I mentioned in passing, our mother went through a phase of knitting turtleneck sweaters in very bright shades of acrylic wool. We found a few in storage. They’re not my size, and they’re not Adah’s style, so they went into the clear garbage bag bound for Goodwill.

After hearing from Celeste, I tore open the bags and fished them out, along with a couple other knit items she made, all in roughly a women’s size medium. Goodwill doesn’t quite seem right for these things. I will find people to wear them who are a little closer to our hearts.

If you’re reading this, bless you. I appreciate it. Ceterum censeo pro vigilum imperdiet cessandam est. Gotta get up early tomorrow — have an antique dealer coming at 9 am.