Mary Loretta Kelly

I wandered around an antique shop today, actually more vintage and junk, than antique. To be considered an antique, the item must be over one hundred years old, I remember being told that.

Among the displays of costume jewelry, piles of books, old toys, bric-a-brac, shelf after shelf of glassware, and some truly scary framed “original” art and faded art prints, I thought about the lives of the people who lived with these things. There was a green metal floral tea tray, my sister had one exactly like that, a wedding gift I always surmised. I found a beautiful glass cut pitcher, reminiscent of my mother’s. The difference was that hers had to be glued back together after someone hit it with a football in the dining room. That was a wedding present, too, from 1940.

But, no one really wants your stuff when you break up the family home when you go into assisted living or are parked momentarily at the local funeral home before the final journey in that elongated black sedan in your last home, covered in flowers, or handed over to a loved one in an urn. 

So this small glass pitcher, dated July 3, 1877 (inscribed on the pewter handle), that I took from my mother’s home meant something. It was the only thing my father kept from his family home after his father died in 1952. It held cider vinegar on ham and beans Wednesdays and maple syrup on pancakes or French toast on Sunday mornings.

My grandmother died from “childbed fever” or puerperal fever nine days after the birth of her sixth child. My father, the eldest, was only ten. He must have remembered his mother’s hand and her smiling face pouring syrup on his pancakes, and that's why he kept it. 

And I hope when I pass on the little pitcher to one of my children, they’ll use it, cherish it, remember our breakfasts together, and not bundle it off to a junk shop.