When All of Your Family Heirlooms are Stories

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From The Literary Hub:

There were six of us cleaning out my grandmother’s apartment after she died—all women, all related, and each with a different relationship to her. We sat on the floor of her cramped one-bedroom apartment, light streaming through the windows and illuminating the dust that scattered from the covers of the books I had stacked to give away.

My grandmother hadn’t really left a will, just her wishes that her things be divided up fairly—a difficult metric to go by, as her idea of fair was always subjective, aligned with whomever was in her favor at the time. My own relationship with her was a complicated one, hindered, as I got older, by the knowledge of her shortcomings as a parent to my beloved mother. I sat among clothes bought on sale, sometimes in duplicates, the tags not yet removed, pieces of fine furniture that had travelled across continents, art books that had been read hundreds of times, and a large tin of jewelry containing the few items that she had not sold. I reached in and pulled out a hand-painted, green wooden box and a pair of silver and freshwater pearl earrings, my heartbeat accelerating at my discovery.

“Oh, I loved those,” said my cousin, “Gran used to wear them all the time. Can I have them?” She reached over to admire them, holding them up to her face to see how they looked.

“They look great on you,” my aunt said.

“You should keep them,” my other cousin suggested.

“No,” I said, surprising everyone. “Please. I gave them to her. I want them.”

It was the only thing that I had asked for all day, my voice lost to the grief of having so many questions that I would never be able to ask her.

“Of course,” my cousin answered, gently passing them back to me. “I didn’t know.”

I was surprised and moved to see that my grandmother had taken such good care of the gift I’d purchased in Florence on a school trip ten years earlier. She had loved that city, and my experience of it was colored by her stories of the beauty of the land and its people. I had found the earrings and little box at a flea market and carefully transported them back in my purse. Green is a color I never wear, and yet, the two things that I hold dear from my grandmother—the jewelry box and the last card she gave me—are both this color. The color of the trees that flanked our weekly walks, the color of the money that drove so many of her motives, and the color of envy—a vice of which I was often guilty, jealous of my younger cousin’s seemingly carefree relationship with her.

Some families have many heirlooms, things that are passed down from generation to generation, but not mine. We have stories. Stories that my grandmother would share with me on our weekly Thursday visits together. It was the one day of the week that I would have her all to myself, giving me a glimpse into her strange and wonderful adult world, a world that she did nothing to alter to meet the needs of a child.

Link to the rest at The Literary Hub

Speaking of Florence, here’s a photo PG took few years ago. He was standing on the Ponte Vecchio, a bridge over the Arno River in the heart of Florence. The Ponte Vecchio is more than just a bridge, small shops selling gold jewelry line each side and, in most cases, are cantilevered out over the river in ways that might not satisfy 21st century building codes. Click for a larger version that looks much more like the original.