Carol's Corner

I read this quote which resonated with me and my love of stories, not only about people but about things.

“My favourite things often have a story behind them and are usually handmade or discovered at a flea market. ” Amy Sedaris

I love flea markets, handmade items and art by people I know and do own items with stories behind them that fall into these categories. However, the first part of the quote really attracted my attention – my favourite things often have a story behind them.

Sometimes family and friends visit my house and look at all the things displayed in it. A comment I have heard, especially before I downsized my collections, went something like this, “Your place is like a museum, but you can tell us stories about the things or how you got them.”

At times I wondered if I wanted to live in home that seemed like a museum. I looked around with fresh eyes. Many pieces had family connections – items passed down from my grandparents, parents or my husband’s family. Others simply have stories of how we found them or the era they were popular. I tell the stores to whomever is interested. Sometimes the stories become illustrations in a presentation I am doing. The things I collect, that I keep, must be things I enjoy and stories make them more enjoyable.

One example is a little pair of ornamental china shoes, one perfect and the other marred by cracks, mended together, now brown with age. Why, would I display a broken and repaired ornament? What significance could this possibly hold?

These ornaments belonged to my grandmother before my birth. Grandma loved these ornaments, partly because of their prettiness, but mostly because they were a gift from her two young adult daughters. One day when I was a young toddler, my grandfather decided to do something special for me and dress up my doll. He took those china shoes from the shelf and started to put one on my doll’s foot. It did not fit but he kept trying to force the little shoe onto the doll’s foot. It broke into pieces. My grandmother picked up the pieces, glued them back together and set the pair of shoes back up on the shelf.

From the time I can begin to remember, those little shoes sat on a shelf in my grandmother’s house. I heard the story of grandpa, my doll and me, over and over until I knew it myself. One day grandma planned to move to a small apartment and offered the shoes to me. She said, “I guess we should throw away the broken one. Don’t know why I kept it all these years. But you can have the good one if you want.”

I responded very quickly, “Don’t throw the one away. I want them both. The story won’t be the same without it.”
She gave me the pair and they now sit on a shelf in my home. I tell the story over and over. The little shoes remind me of my grandmother but they are also a reminder of love. Grandma loved me and did not get upset about the broken shoe. Grandma loved the givers of the ornaments and fixed the one to keep them together.

These little shoes, mended in love, remind me too that I am loved by God, even when I feel so broken. When I give him all the pieces of my life he puts them back together. Sometimes the brown glue peeks through but only serves as a reminder of love.

I likely could do 31 days of blog posts simply on the stories behind items I own, things I am the caretaker of. I hope others in the family will enjoy them, know the stories and pass them on. I have been challenged to begin taking a photo of the object and writing the story to go with it so the tale does not get lost and the item become just a piece of junk in the eyes of younger generations.

Do you have items with stories behind them? How do you share these stories and things?