A mother who saved everything

Ovid Vickers
The Newton Record

NEWTON May 07, 2008 04:39 pm

— My mother was a wonderful person, but she had one peculiar trait. She saved everything. I do not know if this great determination to save whatever came her way was a fetish or the result of having lived through the Great Depression.
When Mama passed away in 1980, Sister and I opened her cedar chest and realized it contained, among other things, a record of our childhood. All our report cards were there along with several pairs of baby shoes. There were sealed enveloped with “baby’s hair” written on the outside. A small box contained several of our first teeth, not to mention a neat stack of garments we had worn as children.
The chest also contained all the valentines we had sent to her over the years. Three shoe boxes were filled with old letters and pictures. Among a trove of family photographs were pictures of Ma-ma’s girlhood friends. I do not know many of the subjects. Some of the pictures have names written on the back. One of the pictures of two girls dressed in the sleeveless, long-waisted and rolled hose style of the 1920s is inscribed “My friends, Lillie Bell and Mamie Lee.”
Another picture is of a stern-faced gentleman in a big black hat. He is identified as “Uncle Bud from Buford.” I did not know my mother had an Uncle Bud. I do know that he had a double barrel shotgun across his lap in the picture.
I have kept all these pictures for two reasons. First, they are a photographic record of a period in time. .Second, I am afraid to destroy them for fear that Mama might speak to me from the beyond about doing away with her picture collection.
Among her many talents, Mama was a gifted seamstress. When she finished cutting out a dress, she carefully saved every scrap of material. She later used the scraps, as many women did, to make quilt tops. I have several of these quilts, and I can identify pieces of fabric from dresses worn by my mother, sister and aunts. I am sure that when Mama pieced these quilts she never dreamed that her great grandchildren would some day have them folded across their beds. Then on the other hand, perhaps she did.
As I was growing up, we never had a shortage of paper bags. When groceries, or anything else in a bag, were brought into the house, Mama straightened each sack, folded it and neatly stored it away. I am sure she would have collected pasteboard boxes, and she did save small ones, had they not required so much room to store.
Mama loved flowers, but I never knew her to buy seed. She had a stock assortment of flowers which she grew: zinnias, castor plants (These seed are very poisonous, and we were warned each fall not to eat them.), princess feathers, snapdragons, spider plants, and sunflowers.
In the fall when the flowers had formed seed pods or the blooms had dried, Mama gathered seeds, a great many of them, and put them in old silk stockings. She then hung the stockings from the rafters of the back porch, where they remained until the next spring.
Old linen was another matter. When sheets, pillowcases, or towels reached the point that they were too worn to continue using, Mama laundered them, folded them carefully and stored them away. I once asked her why she kept such a store of worn sheets and pillowcases. Her reply was, “Well, someone might et sick, and I may need them.” As long as I remained at home, I never knew any member of the family to have an illness which required the use of old linen.
Then there were the jars. It seems to me that boxes of jars were everywhere, in the smokehouse, in the barn, under the house, and on shelves above the cabinets in the kitchen. These collections consisted of jars of every kind, size, shape, and use. Oh, we had the standard quart and pint jars used for canning, but Mama saved every jar that was empty. Pickle jars, coffee jars, and peanut butter jars were carefully washed, along with the lid, and saved. Neighbors even came to our house to borrow jars during the canning, jelly making, and preserving season. The jar collection was compounded by the fact that the neighbors always returned more jars than they had borrowed.
I have always been grateful for the fact that mama was a “saver.” The photographs, letters, newspaper clippings, Bibles, legal papers, and objects which my mother saved are in truth a history of my family. I now have certain things in my home which belonged to my great grandparents. I can thank my mother for taking care of these “family treasures” so they could be passed along to my sister and me and to future generations of the family.

Ovid Vickers, a retired East Central Community College professor, writes a weekly column for The Newton Record.