I was going through the things that had actually made it to the storefront from my mother‘s house in one of the many trips that I made before we decided to sell it. I found one of my grandmother’s keepsakes. It was an old ceramic mug that had BMC Durfee High School, Class of 1937, 35th Reunion, June 10, 1972 printed on it. You can see it in the picture below. It brought back a flood of memories about my grandmother and my life in Fall River, Massachusetts. It’s amazing how one small thing can bring back an entire lifetime.
My grandmother was an extraordinary woman. She was the first woman of our family that was born in this country. They lived in a small village outside of Milan, Italy, and had to leave because my great grandmother‘s herbal remedies were better than the doctor they had in the village, and she was accused of witchcraft because they worked better. They started out going through New York City and eventually moved to Fall River, Massachusetts, where they became a very respected family. They were business owners, and although they were not the ultra high class people that lived on Highland Avenue, they were known for helping everybody. At one time I had found an article about my grandmother, my great aunt Anne, and my great aunt Mimi opening a restaurant that was a Pay what you can restaurant during the depression. For some reason, that restaurant always had enough food for everybody and stayed open, from what I understand, until my grandmother married and had my mother. These were the kind of people that helped to raise me and helped to form the person that I am today.
Some of you may have already read my blog post about “Fabric Samples“ and have an idea about who Aunt Anne and Auntie Mimi and my grandmother were. My aunt was the oldest of all of the children when they got to this country. She started working in a hosiery mill. She had several fiancé‘s, all of them died before she could get married, but she was also the one that carried on the tradition of the herbalism. Aunt Anne was the one that could make any pastry ever just by tasting at once. She could re-create the recipe and most of the time improve on it.
Auntie Mimi started high school, but never finished. She got married very young and worked as a laundress. She was the one that made the best stews and the best soups out of all of our kitchen witches. My grandmother excelled at lasagna and eggplant.
These three ladies lived with us for most of my life. It was not unheard of for me to come home and have someone at the kitchen table or in a chair or even on the kitchen table while Aunt Anne applied various herbal wraps or gave them an herbal tea or tincture to help with their afflictions. One of my chores every Saturday morning before I was allowed to go to dance class was to take the bottle tinctures out of the corner cabinet that no one knows what to do with when you have one in your kitchen and pull all the mason jars out, flip them over and mark the new date on the bottom or the top with a wax pencil. You had to keep all of the dates so that you knew that the tincture had brewed for 6 to 8 weeks because it wasn’t strong enough until then. I truly did grow up in a house with Kitchen Witches because everything that came out of their kitchen was absolutely magical.
Going back to the mug, it was something that my grandmother was very proud of. She was the first woman in her entire family to finish high school while Aunt and Auntie Mimi went out to hold up jobs. My grandmother‘s place as the baby of the family meant that she didn’t have to go get a job right away. She was allowed to go onto art college, and she chose art college instead of secretary school, which was unheard of in those days. She wanted to be an artist. She was always the smartest person in the room because she believed in learning. They teased her about it. They argued because they didn’t get to go to school. But she was determined to get the kind of education that she wanted.
When I was in sixth or seventh grade, I did a science fair research paper on cell division. I wrote it out long hand because I didn’t know how to type, but it was required that someone typed it. My grandmother was the one that was able to type it for me. She noticed that I had two of the steps in the wrong order in my hand, writing everything out, and she just glanced at them and fixed them as she was typing them. After she corrected it, she brought it to me and showed me that I had written them in the wrong order because she didn’t want me to get anything wrong when I gave my presentation. That’s just how smart she was. She paid so much attention to detail. She valued teaching me what I did wrong without any condemnation or gloating that she noticed. The gloating was something other people in the family might have done.
My grandmother was called a secretary at her job, but from what I understand, and how she explained what she actually did, she was more of a lab assistant or a personal assistant to the scientists that were working on polyester. That’s one of the reasons she had so many fabric samples. They were what the scientists were testing on and they were not big enough for any kind of clothes. If you read “Fabric Samples“, you already know what she did with them and how she influenced that part of my art.
The mug is from 1972, and here we are in a whole new century, and it was celebrating the class that graduated, almost 90 years ago, in 1937. She kept that because education was important to her. She kept that because she was a woman that was a part of that graduating class. She kept that because she knew that someday it would remind me of all of the different things that were important to our family: her sister’s working in the kitchen, the restaurant story, the tinctures, the science paper, the education that she got and encouraged my mother to get and encouraged me to get. She knew that that small object would bring back all of those things. Of course, she probably didn’t realize that it would be this time in my life that all of those things would come back to remind me of all of the things that are truly important. She probably didn’t expect that mug to survive all of the moves that my mother and father had with the Navy and all of the moves that I had with Darren and the Army.
That mug is more than just an old mug. That mug is a keepsake. It isn’t just some material thing. It is a reminder of what our family still considers important. I picked up that old mug, and I remembered.
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