Nested Heirlooms
Essay | Corin Bauman
If I was a better granddaughter of a carpenter, I would know what wood makes up the hope chest that was once my mother’s and now is mine. When I was small, the chest sat behind the mirrored closet doors in the master bedroom of our two-bedroom apartment. I don’t remember what was inside the chest, mostly because it wasn’t as interesting as what was tucked in the secret drawer that my grandfather had engineered on the chest’s underside.
Standing facing the chest, on the right-hand side, what appears as just the edge of the framing is actually a perfectly angled slip of wood that when tapped like a Jenga piece reveals a thin hidden drawer. There are probably carpentry terms that describe these craftsmanship choices, that if I was a better daughter of a daughter of a carpenter I would have remembered from my mother’s stories, but I don’t. As a young girl, I would slide the angled wood piece effortlessly, and pull on the small, knobbed drawer suspended underneath the chest to hide tiny treasures of mine. A stick that was shaped perfectly like a wand, precious (to me) stones collected from creek side and ocean shore adventures, a beaded bracelet made and given to me by my best friend Brittany.
When my mom died, I worried my brother and I would fight over our grandfather’s work. He said he only wanted the old typewriter. Without incident, we carried the heirlooms from our mother that meant the most to us to our respective adult homes.
The hope chest had signs of aging, the worst being the warped boards of the interlocking pieces that made up its lid. I asked my future father-in-law if he could fix it. He said he’d be honored. The loose boards were tightened and smoothed. Hinges added to the heavy lid to ease its use. Metal handles screwed into the ends to carry the chest. When he returned the piece to me, he asked, “did you know about this?” tapping the slip of wood to reveal the hidden drawer.
I told him, “Of course,” I knew about the drawer. Peering inside, the end of a stick peeked out. Maybe the one I remembered being shaped like a wand. Pulling it out, instead of a wand, I held a spear of sorts. Wildly curved, with a haphazard sharpened end, it was truly a useless weapon.
Had I made this spear? I wondered. Why had I hidden it in the drawer? My memory failed to retrieve any recollection. I knew my mom could have told me the origin story of this stick/spear/wand. Not being able to remember the significance of this childhood treasure made me grieve the loss of my mother all over again, of her memories of me, of the connection to myself through her stories. If I was a better daughter of the oral keeper of our family lore, I would have been able to tell the stick’s history.
I still wonder why she had kept it all these years. Maybe it had meant something to her. An heirloom of my childhood, a talisman of her children’s wonderment. Or maybe she didn’t even know it was stowed away, and her possible sentimentality is just a projection of how I experienced her love.
The chest that now holds blankets and delicate treasures of the fiber arts—a white embroidered handkerchief that was my grandmother’s, a death shroud quilted by the generous hands of strangers laid on my mother’s feet in the ICU bed, a cotton baby blanket adorned with faded primary colors that was my brother’s and then mine. The stick still lays in the drawer, hidden on the underside of the chest. Like a Russian nesting doll, her heirloom of my childhood hidden inside my heirloom of hers.