ORDINARY THINGS BRING EXTRAORDINARY JOY
Families reflect on the cherished artifacts they rescued and restored
Amid all the frenzied decluttering, organizing and tidying going on these days, it’s easy to overlook the special things worth keeping.
They may be locked in a safe-deposit box, wrapped in tissue in a closet or entombed in a plastic container in a storage unit. They might be faded or torn, ravaged by moths and the passage of time.
Rescuing a family artifact takes thought and often money. But the act of saving it and honouring it can be tremendously satisfying.
Ingrid Fetell Lee, founder of the blog, the Aesthetics of Joy, believes in the power of ordinary things to create extraordinary happiness.
“I think when you keep fewer things, you value them more,” she says. “Instead of having thousands of photos in boxes, you keep and frame the ones you really love.”
Lee says when objects are invested with experiences, they can prompt a memory of an event or sensation.
“There is a sensory experience embedded in that object.”
We asked five families about the objects they could never part with. Here are their stories:
Patrick Gossett grew up in Riverdale Park, Md., where some of his fondest childhood memories were made in the family dining room. When his mother pulled her eight jewel-toned wineglasses out of the china cabinet, he knew something good was about to happen.
“My mother loved beautiful things, simple things,” Gossett says. “These glasses were brought out for special occasions. They meant a lot to her, and they mean a lot to me.”
In the 1930s, before she was married, Gossett’s mother Elizabeth took the streetcar downtown to her job as a secretary. The women she commuted with — Lib, Stell, Marie, Mable, Rhoda and Elaine — became her posse. The group regularly passed a fancy shop where they often stopped and Elizabeth would admire a set of colourful handblown wineglasses.
When she married in 1935, the women pooled their money and gave her the glasses as a wedding present. They became a symbol of festive times in the Gossett home at holidays.
Gossett inherited the glasses in 2000, when his mother died at age 88 and he and his two older brothers divided up her things.
“You go back to those things in your life that bring back pleasant memories,” says Gossett, 65.
“I know decluttering is the new emphasis these days,” he says. “But knowing how much my mother loved and used these makes our own occasions even more significant.”
The diamond cocktail ring Marcia Kepler Noor’s mother gave her in the 1980s was gorgeous, but it seemed a bit glitzy for everyday wear. The cluster of diamonds on high prongs formed a flower, a design popular about 100 years ago. The ring had originally belonged to Kepler Noor’s great-grandmother, and was handed down for generations.
After Kepler Noor, 53 gave birth to twin girls, Zoe and Alex Noor, she says she gained “a different perspective on passing things down and saving memories.” Kepler Noor’s mother, Esther, had died before Zoe and Alex were born, but the family speaks of her often.
Last year, Kepler Noor and her husband, Enam Noor, decided repurposing the ring into a gift for each girl would be a wonderful way to honour the past and embrace the future.
Tim Shaheen and Meaghan Foran of Alexandria & Co. Workshop and Design Studio designed the twins’ rings to be slightly different. Both got a new sapphire (yellow for Zoe and blue for Alex) and four small diamonds from their grandmother’s ring. Zoe’s is set in 14-karat gold, Alex’s in 14-karat white gold. The centre diamond was set into a necklace for Kepler Noor and is flanked by two new small diamonds that represent her and her sister, Rachel.
The girls were presented with the rings at their 16th birthday party.
“I never owned anything with a story like this,” Alex says. “When I got the ring, I knew I would wear it all the time.”
Says Kepler Noor: “That ring was like a piece of my mom. But the great part is that now, we can all wear it.”
The small mahogany captain’s desk in Bryant and Madeleine Mitchell’s Old Town Alexandria, Va., townhouse has lots of stories to tell. The 1870 English antique has been in Bryant Mitchell’s family for more than 100 years. He first remembers the piece at his grandfather’s house.
“My grandfather, Solomon Phillips, was my best buddy. We were very close,” says Mitchell, 72. “This desk means a lot to me.”
Mitchell’s mother told him stories of when her three older sisters would receive gentlemen callers in the living room.
“If Grandpa saw they were staying too late, he would come into the living room and act like he was writing at this desk,” Mitchell says. “The guys would get the hint and wrap up their visit.”
No one knows when the tiltfront desk came into their family. The top lifts up, and there are individual slots for letters. It has unusually small drawers on the side that used to hold rolls of nickels, which were given out to Mitchell and her siblings for lunch money.
Bryant and Madeleine inherited the desk in 2006 from his aunt Agnes. Once it was polished, the desk was ready for its new home with the Mitchells and their daughter, Phillips. The family joked that “Bryant might do the same thing with this desk,” says Madeleine, recalling Solomon Phillips’s “bill paying.”
He never did, and now Phillips, 28, lives in New York. They hope someday she’ll start a new chapter in the history of the desk.
When Nathan Canestaro was growing up, he didn’t know much about his grandfather Herbert Todd’s service in the navy in the Second World War.
“He never talked about the war,” says Canestaro, 45. “He put that phase of his life behind him. His war memorabilia was hidden in a box in the basement. When I asked him about it near the end of his life, he started crying. It broke my heart.”
Todd, a master carpenter in Cortland, N.Y., died in 2010 at age 89. That’s when Canestaro, a defence analyst for the U.S. government, started unravelling the story of Todd’s service in the Pacific.
“I wanted to find out more,” says Canestaro, who lives in Washington, D.C., with his wife, Sarah, and two young sons. “I’m interested in military history, and I didn’t want my grandfather’s things to just be another box of stuff. If you don’t pass these stories on, they get lost.”
The box eventually made its way to Canestaro. Included in it were two uniforms, a flak helmet, service ribbons and photos. The most intriguing find: a plastic bag full of colourful fabric maps and documents folded in tiny squares.
This year, he restored four of the cloths. One was a rayon “blood chit,” which aircrews were issued containing a message in a local language that asks for help if stranded and offers rewards. (The term “blood chit” means that it was meant to save a life — that the U.S. government promised to pay for the life of the bearer.)
The others were survival maps, navigational aids for downed aviators: two double-sided rayon maps of Pacific Ocean currents and a large silk map of Mindanao, Philippines.
The blood chit was mounted on an archival padded board; the maps were carefully stitched to silk organza borders for framing. Butler had them displayed in custom walnut frames using silkwrapped mats and Uv-filtering Plexiglas. The two double-sided survival maps were placed in double-sided frames.
What would Todd have thought of his grandson doing this?
“Honestly, I think Grandpa would have been appalled,” Canestaro says. “It was not in his nature to draw attention to himself. But I want to pass these things along to my kids, and I will only do it once.”
These days, formal china isn’t often in great demand when family heirlooms are divvied up. But for Deb Baum and her sister, Becca Groothuis, figuring out who is going to get their mom’s goldrimmed vintage Lenox is a continuing negotiation.
“We joke about it and call it ‘the embattled china,’” says Baum.
For now, the two of them just agree to disagree about the china. Their mother, Ann Goldstein, died in 2011.
“Neither of us can let go of it, so it will stay with my dad for now,” Baum says.
But Baum found a way for both sisters to enjoy the china. In 2015, photographer Shana Novak started the Heirloomist, a business that specializes in photographing personal artifacts and turning them into bold prints.
A dinner plate was shipped to Novak. The photo she took makes the plate look larger than life. It is displayed in a 42-inch-square frame and hangs in the Baums’ dining room. Baum commissioned a smaller version as a gift for her sister.
As Baum put it: “I like to find meaning in the things that I look at every day.”