Glass Bluebird Keepsake

I surveyed the rooms of my own home, starting in our sunroom where three glass bluebirds were perched upon a south-facing window sill. They were gifts from my mother-in-law, Margaret Cooney Nagle, who collected little glass birds and placed them on her own window sills behind veils of white, wispy, floor-to-ceiling sheers. The vintage birds transformed rays of afternoon sunshine into brilliant prismatic beams and cast their rainbow bands against the sheetrock walls. To me, the whimsical birds were more than colorful knickknacks. They were reminders of Margaret and our visits to my in-law’s home.

Everyone has a keepsake, and every keepsake has a story to tell. What's yours?

Photo by Misty Wheeler

Heart of Hearts—The Pendant

It was practically a miracle I graduated from college.  My last year at Georgia Tech in Atlanta was a blur of my taking impossible Mechanical Engineering exams, isolating myself in quiet corners of the library, and walking around campus like a zombie (sleep eluded me for most of that last year, and I vowed that if I ever got out of Tech alive, I would never pull an all-nighter ever, ever again).

But something else was going on in my life that year. I carried a dark passenger with me—lugged the passenger around with me to class every day as if I was Atlas carrying the world on my shoulders, dragged the passenger home with me in the evenings like a dead body, and begged the passenger for a few hours of sweet-dream sleep each and every night.  Though I didn’t talk about it much, there were big problems 100 miles away at my home in Bonaire that year.   

For lack of better words, my father experienced some type of out-of-the-blue midlife crisis that year which led him to leave my mother and me.

He grew distant from us. He showed immeasurable apathy and anger toward us. And then he just stopped coming home. Instead, he chose to spend his nights sleeping underneath the stars at a nearby hunting club or in the company of another woman.

Yes, he stated a reason for leaving, but it was a lame and illogical reason.

My older brother and sister were married and busy with their own lives when the proverbial shit hit the fan. And so, Mom and I tried to handle the situation ourselves, but we failed miserably.

Consumed by the situation, I called home often that year to check on my mother.  She needed a friend, but as a young adult, I didn’t know how to offer the kind of support she needed. I tried, though. On the weekends, I drove home to Bonaire and experienced the loneliness of our home with her. Sometimes my father would make a brief appearance—Mom and I both begging him to stay—and then he would leave again. 

His leaving crushed us. It’s a wound that healed years ago but left really ugly scars on our psyches.

My father returned home later that year, and my parents started the work of rebuilding their relationship. To my knowledge, he never apologized to Mom, and no, he never told me he was sorry. The three of us focused on moving forward.

In the midst of our family’s situation that year, my grades plummeted to an all time low. My parents joined forces and voiced a lot of disappointment, dissatisfaction, and irritation with me, and I understood their frustration.  I, too, was disappointed, dissatisfied, and irritated with myself, but I lacked the energy to pull myself up from the depths. The three of us argued a lot. Some of the arguments were heated and still haunt me. I felt so lost and hollow. For the first time in my life, I felt unloved.

But some how, some way, I graduated. They all came to witness me walk—my brother and his first wife, my sister and her first husband, Grandmother Lanier, Aunt Colleen, Mom, and Daddy. After the commencement ceremony, we dined—as a family—at Red Lobster on Cobb Parkway. My parents beamed with happiness, relief, and pride. But still, I knew I had caused a lot of pain and distress, and so the shame of letting them down still plagued me, even as we sat at the restaurant that day pretending that all was fine.

Mom slid a little wrapped box across the table to me—a graduation gift from her and my dad. The gesture threw me a bit, because it had not occurred to me that they would give me a graduation gift.  They had dished out thousands of dollars for me to go to college and that was more than enough. Plus, I had been a constant source of aggravation to them in the months leading up to my graduation. I felt unworthy of their gift.

The box contained a gold serpentine chain holding a small pendant—twenty-five sparkling diamonds in the shape of a heart. It was the most beautiful piece of jewelry I had ever seen, and the symbolism of the heart wasn’t lost on me.

“You’ll always be in our hearts,” Mom said. “We want you to know that no matter where you go in life or what you do, we will always love you.”

I put the necklace around my neck that day, and I felt my parents’ unconditional love once again—as bright, warm, and penetrating as summer sunshine on my bare shoulders. At that moment, I realized their love had been with me all along. It had been temporarily hidden—eclipsed by the sadness and weight of our family’s problems—but it had been there.

The diamond-encrusted heart pendant became a keepsake, and I wore it often in the years that followed my graduation.

Life unfolded for me. I joined the workforce. I got married. My father died. Mom remarried a few years later. Our family experienced divorces, marriages, births, and funerals.  I reinvented myself and launched a new career. 

Mom and I don’t talk about the year of my dad’s midlife crisis very often.  We still don’t really understand what happened that year, or why. But it came up last week after I mentioned a recurring dream to her on the phone. In my dream, I was in college again and it was finals week and I realized that there was a course on my schedule that I hadn’t attended all quarter and I freaked out.

“Sometimes when I dream that dream, I wake up in a cold sweat, realize that it was just a dream, and thank God that I am out of school,” I laughed.

“Dreams are funny, aren’t they?” Mom remarked. “I’d love to really study why we dream the things we dream.”

“Do you have a recurring dream, Mom?” I asked.

She paused then said, “Yes, I dream that your father is walking out of the house and I am running behind him begging him to stay, but he won’t stop.  He just keeps walking away from me. Sometimes the dream is so real that it scares me. I wake up so upset that I can’t go back to sleep. I dream it two or three times each month."

“We actually lived through that,” I said. “That was a really tough time for us.”

We both fell silent on the phone recalling the events. It was as if I relived the entire year in a single moment, and then for the first time in a very long time, I got mad at my father.

"You know what you should do?” I said to my mother. “The next time you have that dream, you should seize control of it and shout, ‘Fine!  Just go!’ Turn around and go back inside the house and never look back. Don’t chase him out the door any more. Just let him leave.”

My anger seemed to come out of nowhere and it made my heart race and my face flush. I got off the phone. 

Shaken by the surge of sudden, unexpected emotion, I paced back and forth on my front porch for a few minutes trying to calm down, but I couldn’t. I took several deep breaths trying to let the feelings go, but they wouldn’t dissipate.

I walked into the house, plucked the diamond pendant from the safety of my jewelry box, and kissed it. I forced myself to focus on the happier memories of my father—and there are hundreds, if not thousands, of happy memories stored in the dark caverns of my mind. I reminded myself of his love—sometimes hidden, eclipsed, broken, and imperfect, but ALWAYS THERE, ALWAYS THERE, ALWAYS THERE—as real to me as the little heart I clutched in my fingertips. I found it hard to put the pendant back in its hiding place that day, but I did. I let it go, and twenty-six years later, I finally let it go.

Read about Project Keepsake at www.ProjectKeepsake.com.

SALE

Great-Grandmother's House Dresses

Late last year, Wallie Waters—my father’s first cousin—contacted me via Facebook and offered me some old clothes that belonged to my great-grandmother. I replied without hesitation, “Yes, I would love to have something that belonged to her. Please hold on to them for me.” 

Maggie Jones Lanier died twenty years before I was born, and so I have no memories of her. Few are alive in my family who possess even a faded photograph or a passed-down story to share with me of her sixty-two years on this pale-blue-dot-of-a-planet. Yet, I came into this world bearing bits and pieces of her DNA. She is part of me, and so I am curious about her—and thankful to her.

I know that she was born in the spring of 1884 and died in the fall of 1946. I know that she was married to Matthew “Math” Lanier, a tall, skinny man who lived to be ninety-nine, wore a hat, and walked with a cane. 

Maggie and Math shared a life together in a small community just north of Metter, Georgia. Together, they raised my papa (Henry Herman), Ruby, Brooks, Fred, Bonnie, Roland, Hubert, Elese, and Matthew. They are buried in the white, sandy soil of Rosemary Primitive Baptist Church amid hundreds of my paternal ancestors with monuments engraved with surnames such as Lanier, Jones, Daughtry, Parrish, and Donaldson.

At my Aunt Sybol’s ninetieth birthday party earlier this year, Cousin Wallie handed the paper sack to my sister and asked her to deliver the contents to me.

Two weeks later, I stood in my sister’s kitchen and unfolded the top of the sack. My hand reached in and touched the past—four vintage house dresses, a tattered bonnet, and some interesting undergarments, all worn by a woman I never knew personally. The pieces had not been worn for seven decades.

I focused on the house dresses.

Back in the day, women like my great-grandmother were worker bees, and house dresses were the uniforms of their daily lives. Their frocks were designed to be durable, practical, easy to move around in, and easy to launder, but with a touch of femininity. 

My great-grandmother’s dresses show several stains from her daily tasks and chores, and I pondered the origin of each stain.  Perhaps one dress was stained as she used the skirt of it to carry blackberries from the roadside to her kitchen to make a cobbler.  Maybe another stain at a waistband originated from grease popping outward from a black iron skillet as she fried the legs and wings of a young rooster. The brown blob on the backside of one? Maybe an oil stain she acquired leaning against the tractor after carrying a glass of water to my great-grandfather and waiting for him to drink up and hand the glass back to her. I’ll never know how the dresses were stained.  I can only imagine given the little I know of the lives of farm wives during the first half of the twentieth century.

All four of Maggie’s dresses are handmade, and I studied the hand stitching on their undersides. Indeed, my great-grandmother may not have owned a store-purchased dress in her lifetime. It’s plausible.

All four dresses were created with floral fabric, and so for a moment, I contemplated that perhaps I inherited my love of flowers and gardening from this woman. Three are made from a very thin cotton, designed to provide cool comfort during the sweltering summer days common in South Georgia. The fourth is made of a dark printed rayon.

The buttons on a blue and pink dress are exquisite and somewhat unexpected, like pearls resting in the dirt. That particular dress is a bit frillier than the others.  It’s embellished with lace that wants to fall apart in my hand when I touch it. I held it up against my body. Maggie must have been much shorter and thicker than me—and much bustier.

I breathed in the stale aroma of the dress, and my mind raced backward to memories of South Georgia cotton fields that look more like freshly fallen snow; of the feeling of cool, freshly-plowed dirt against my bare feet; of the warmth and weight of handmade quilts on a brisk winter’s morning; of carrying long cane fishing poles up to a pond; and of the intoxicating smell of the inside of a dark, scary tobacco barn.

I stuffed the garments back in the bag and drove home, all the while wondering what I would do with my newest keepsakes.  Would I find a seamstress to alter one for me to wear on occasion? Would I cut the house dresses into squares and make a blanket or quilt? Would I craft a pillow from the floral fabrics? Would I simply stow them in a closet and occasionally take them out and dream of Maggie?

I washed the house dresses carefully and ironed them on the lowest setting of my iron. I hung them in a breeze on the front porch and watched them dance against the back drop of a beautiful spring day, and I thought, “rebirth.” It’s a common theme of my thoughts—the idea of objects and souls being recycled and born again. 

How will Maggie’s dresses be reborn?  I haven’t decided yet, but they will. They will be transformed into something truly magnificent.

I’m sure that Maggie never imagined that one day, one of her great-granddaughters would want her old stained house dresses—that the youngest granddaughter of her oldest son would label her garments as “keepsakes,”  vow to care for them for the rest of her days, and write about them and their significance. But that is precisely what has happened. And each time I look at them, I will mouth a silent “thank you” to Maggie Jones Lanier for giving life to my grandfather, who gave life to my dad, who gave life to me.

For more about Project Keepsake, visit my website at www.ProjectKeepsake.com. 

Everyone Has A Keepsake

"Everyone has a keepsake, and every keepsake has a story to tell." —Amber Lanier Nagle, from Project Keepsake