PAM FRAMPTON: Finding heirlooms in unexpected places

“Seeing my father’s handwriting places me in touch with the person he was at every stage of his life.” — John Carter Money

I’m studying my good friend Russell Wangersky’s new e-book, “Similar Floor,” which paperwork the journey he and his spouse, Leslie Vryenhoek, made to observe the trail of his great-great-grandfather throughout America on the Gold Rush Path of 1849.

I’m having fun with Russell’s beautiful descriptions of sagebrush, the quirkiness of classic motels and household diners, and the expanses of night time sky and open plain as they drive as shut as they’ll to the route his ancestor adopted by horse and wagon, by mule and on foot.

However what I’m having fun with much more is their pursuit of household ties, the seek for linkages and that means between that era and those that adopted.

It’s one thing many people do — attempt to discover connections to make us really feel extra deeply rooted in a spot, to reassure ourselves that we belong someplace.

Typically we depart clues — each intentional and unintentional — for the era that follows us within the objects we gather in our lifetime. And I’m considering of following Russell’s lead in writing a listing for our kids to search out, a key that unlocks a few of who we had been; a translation of a number of the mementoes we saved and why they matter.

There are “too many issues that you just and I each will want you’ll have requested about, however all the time thought we might have time for later,” Russell writes.

And he’s proper.

My household has by no means had a lot in the best way of household heirlooms.

I’ve helped transfer my mother and father 4 occasions now.

We sifted via the contents of a rented townhouse and summer season place to assist them downsize to a retirement house, promoting issues off at yard gross sales and donating to thrift shops — drowning in a sea of possessions amassed over greater than 60 years of marriage.

We shifted mother from a much bigger condo to a smaller one after dad died, after which from one house to a different.

My household has by no means had a lot in the best way of household heirlooms. Our mother and father got here from two completely different outport communities in two completely different bays, and moved a number of occasions early of their marriage. We had been raised in a small group the place neither mother or father had blood ties.

I knew just one grandparent — my paternal grandmother — who died once I was three, so there have been no inheritances, simply hand-me-downs; only a few treasured objects that I might maintain and picture a forebear having achieved the identical.

Which will clarify why I’ve spent most of my life making an attempt to unearth household connections in soil that has lengthy gone untilled.

Years in the past I rescued two church window frames with gothic arches from a constructing my grandfather and great-grandfather would have helped construct — a long-gone church whose presence is marked solely by the graveyard that is still.

I discovered and preserved one cast-iron scrolled steel aspect of the pot-bellied range that my dad would have warmed his arms in entrance of on an overgrown piece of land that was as soon as house to the small schoolhouse he attended.

Whimsical, purposeless junk to an uninformed eye, however priceless and irreplaceable to me — objects that had been touched by maybe three or 4 generations.

Certainly one of my favorite finds, which fell out of a e-book once we had been cleansing out my dad’s house workplace, is a four-inch by four-inch piece of notepaper which accommodates two of my father’s spontaneous poems, distinguished by his exact and stylish handwriting, and the easy rhyming scheme of the poetry he remembered from his childhood and would recite at any alternative.

I can inform from the context — and right here’s the place household information is available in — that they had been written when my mom (the household cook dinner) was away on one among her uncommon sojourns and my culinarily ill-equipped father was left to fend for himself within the kitchen.

Supper:

“Ten hen nuggets,

Sitting on a plate;

I popped them within the micro-wave,

And fairly quickly I ate.”

It’s superb what these 4 strains comprise; what they maintain of his voice (his sense of playfulness and surprise, his appreciation of sustenance) and what they reveal of who he was (humourous, old-school — witness the hyphen in “micro-wave” — a person of easy tastes and pleasures, and one who favored to file his observations of the world round him in pen and ink.)

It’s with some irony that I preserve it protected between the pages of a Jacques Pépin cookbook.

It’s just a little piece of paper that, after I’m gone, may give somebody who finds it a smile and nothing extra.

Except, like Russell, you at the least depart some kind of roadmap behind.

A map of the human coronary heart.

Pam Frampton is SaltWire Community’s Exterior Opinions Editor. She lives in St. John’s. E mail [email protected] Twitter: pam_frampton