Stories that make it meaningful.

I have a small blue dinner plate in my hutch. It’s my grandmother’s hutch. It’s my grandmother’s plate, except, that it isn’t. It’s my great, great, great, great, great grandmother’s plate. 5 greats. That’s all I can recall about that plate. It’s old. It’s really old and it was important for me to have it and to know it. My grandmother told me every time I came to visit that some day it would be mine. She was true to her word, and now it’s one of the items I have to grab it there’s a fire. I have special box set aside to pack it, along with all the pets.

Sadly that’s all I know about the plate now. There is no great story as to why THAT plate, is THE plate that was passed from generation to generation. Did it survive a fire? Did it belong to a set? Did my 5 great grandmother save her egg money to buy it because it was beautiful and she wanted something she could gaze upon? Why is the gold paint scratched? Who ate off it?

I thought perhaps it was particularly valuable, but I looked it up with an antique app. It’s not unusually rare - not something a museum would want, not something I could sell if I only had the clothes on my back.

I wish I knew. I wish I knew the long story of the plate. Perhaps, someday, I will write a short story for my child about the plate. Include the time some famous royalty passed through town and stayed at the house and ate cake off that plate. It would have been in England in the beginning, before it found its way to Wisconsin.

Perhaps the my story will include the time it was rescued from the fire, or when the box was dropped by the hired hand, and it was the only plate not broken, and it’s survival was interpreted as some kind of great fortune. I could say what I want, because I know no different, nor will anyone after me. It would be a lot more fun with some kind of prior life.

Honestly, I often wish I had the coal box that my grandmother rested her feet on, during cold winter rides to school on the sleigh. I can picture more about the coal box, dirtying up her button up shoes, or resting just out of reach of her cold toes when she was little. I picture her feet resting on the coal box when the Native American children, on their own horses, would ride alongside the carriage as she went to school. I know how that box mattered. I know how that impacted her on those cold days, and tripped her up when she scrambled out of the carriage to ride the horses. My grandmother would find it a strange thing to care about, but the coal box had an interesting life.

We think we have time to tell the stories, or that our stories will carry on once we are gone if we tell them enough times. Sadly, I have 5 greats. It’s remarkable, and yet, that’s the only reason I will pass it on. Because for my child, it will be 6.