WHAT SHE LEFT BEHIND

My mother left the old prewar studio photos of her and Dad taken after their marriage. Her fine hair rolls up to the top of her head in the fashion of the time. My father’s short, dark moustache looks a bit like Hitler’s but it’s uneven, as if he shaved in a hurry. I doubt he gave a damn about having his picture taken but perhaps this photo was meant to be a gift to his parents. Mom never said much about those years before I was born and of course I wasn’t the least bit interested in anything that happened before Me.

My house is full of my father’s stuff. I use the low, square pine box my father’s grandfather, Ernst Hanefeld, built to carry his woodworking tools from Paris to Philadelphia. Father’s. In the living room, a long cocktail table Dad concocted for my mother out of odd legs and a walnut plank just before he died. The legs are a bit crooked, like his moustache in the photo.

Mom loved to go junking with a gal friend, counting the bills in her purse, asking Dad for more, then heading out as soon as I left for school and not back until dark. In the fifties and early sixties you could find treasures in rural Connecticut because nobody used decorators in those days.

She bought all kinds of old things, furniture and picture frames and old tinware and silverware and pewter and copper bowls and things you could make things out of. They had to be original and authentic, nothing reproduction. She glued and sanded, she caned and laid on gold leaf. She swapped and traded gave stuff away just for the hell of it. Giving stuff away is a good reason to buy it in the first place.

That’s one of the things she left me: generosity.

The old cherry table’s drop-leaves were always so loose Dad could hardly cut his lamb chop. The bottom of the drawer has shrunk over it’s hundred and fifty, maybe more, years, so it won’t hold a paperclip. Mom eventually bought a more rugged pine table two people could actually put their elbows on. I gave that to my daughter.

I gave my daughter the bright Victorian quilt Mom gave me. And the pretty Kelim rug. My dog had chewed one corner off it but the rug itself was so handsome you just had to use it. Perhaps my daughter’s dog has evened up the opposite corner by now.

Dogs, that’s another thing my mother left me. We always had dogs, hers and mine.

“Mom, you gotta get a dog,” I told her when the spaniel died.

I’m too old,” she said.

Dog dog dog, I insisted. True, she was old and not just old but getting dotty.

When that rug-chewing boy went to join his ancestors, I went dogless. But I’m not too old to have a dog again so here I am with a another. A rug piddler this time.

So, dogs, that’s another thing she left me.

What has she left me that I would I save if the house were burning down? I am too full of her stories to choose. The birch trees of her Rochester childhood, the mother she lost, the red setters that lay under the piano? Popovers—when did I last make those? It’s a lot of dust in the attic, a lot of stuff falling out of that drawer.

Oh, one other thing she left: an old, heavy, maple cutting board shaped like a pig. I’ve chopped bushels of onions on it and perhaps a hundred miles of celery for her duck stuffing. Mother instructed me very carefully how to keep it clean. I was to slosh bleach on it occasionally, then anoint it with olive oil, then put it out in the sun to dry.

The pigboard and the dog. Enough.