In the middle of my workshop is my mom’s hope chest, a two-by-three-foot cedar chest. Long ago, she told me that as a young girl, this is where she saved embroidered tea towels and other things she’d need for her future married life. I doubt today’s young girls have hope chests. I certainly didn’t.
I hadn’t thought of that chest in years, but it recently came back into my life after my brother’s death last October. First, I didn’t remember that Stan had it, and second, I’m unsure why he stored it at the back of a closed shed inside a pole barn on his creek-lined land. It was just recently discovered, and I’ve been sorting through the musty memories.
In it are Stan’s keepsakes.
One photo album is filled with wide vistas of Lake Tahoe where he worked the summer between his freshmen and sophomore years at community college. Page after page of friends and lake and mountains speak of carefree fun. It was his first taste of life, independence, and adventure, and he spoke of it often as a place he’d like to return.
Also in the chest is the guest book from Stan’s wedding in New Jersey. That marriage lasted only ten years and he never got over it.
I found a dozen cream pitchers carefully packed in that chest. My grandma collected over 200 pitchers.
She had stuffed a note with name of gift giver and date inside each one. Obviously, Stan had picked his favorites, and most had his and his wife’s names on the gift note. I didn’t know he was that sentimental.
We never really know a person, although saved treasures shine light on hidden emotions.
Mark Twain said it best. “What a wee little part of a person’s life are his acts and his words! His real life is led in his head, and is known to none but himself. All day long, the mill of his brain is grinding, and his thoughts, not those of other things, are his history. These are his life, and they are not written. Every day would make a whole book of 80,000 words — 365 books a year. Biographies are but the clothes and buttons of the man — the biography of the man himself cannot be written.”
