Part of a mother’s role is to pass things down and my mother often reminded me of the value of the items she’d be handing on. Auntie Jean’s Kosta Boda vase (which we kids called the “Costa Loada” [money] vase) and grandma Olive’s China tea set were just some of the things destined to be handed on.
I remember when I was about 12, my mother went through the house putting coloured dots on the underside of everything of value. When she’d finished, she took me by the hand and showed me what she’d done. She explained that each child had a colour and each dot represented items she intended us to have. I was too young at the time to have any real concept of mortality and found the exercise particularly disturbing.
When my mother died five years later, I inherited my selection of the things with the dots. I tried to keep as much as I could but over the coming years I sold numerous pieces until all that remained was a handful of boxes that I moved from house to house without ever fully unpacking them.
Nearly two decades passed when another house move led me to further downsize my possessions and do a deep dive into the boxes I’d been holding on to for so long. There was some Irish table linen that the moths had been dining on (which now looked more like lace than linen) plus dozens of china ornaments – most of which had become broken or chipped. There were also countless mouldy and battered books packed around all manner of odds and sods. After all these years the hand-me-downs had been reduced to a collection of things suitable only for the tip.
I felt sad and guilty as I discarded them into the skip bin but as I like to recycle, I up-ended one of the boxes that was still in good condition to at least salvage something from the hand-me-down disaster; it was one of the boxes I’d originally grabbed from our family home to pack up my inherited things.
After I tipped its contents onto the pile of refuse, I shook it to release the dust and dirt trapped around the base. I looked inside to check that everything was gone and saw the corner of an envelope poking out from the bottom folds of the box. When I slid it out, I saw my mother’s name written across the envelope’s face in faded black ink. The handwriting was totally familiar.
I carefully opened the envelope and inside was a letter that took my breath away. It was my father’s letter of proposal to my mother, written in 1945.
“My heart is yours until the last beat,” he wrote and he asked my mother to be his wife and partner in all things. With it was a small black and white photo of a man in army uniform looking lucky and a young woman looking nervously happy.
I don’t worry any more about the things with the dots. I have a letter instead.