I washed my grandmother’s butter dish today. Such an odd feeling came over me. I was looking at my hands, wet with soapy bubbles, and suddenly they were not mine, but my grandmother’s.
Though I never knew her and have seen only one picture of her once in my lifetime, I felt this almost electric connection to this person whose blood I carry in my veins. My eyes welled with tears that dropped in the bubbles, breaking their delicate surfaces. In stillness I stood wondering where on Earth all this feeling came from, wondering what she was like. Did she daydream with hands in soapy water, washing dishes? Did an electric moment ever connect her to the past or to the future of a granddaughter, now an elder who would carefully and lovingly wash something as mundane as a butter dish? Does life in a cabin deep in Louisiana woods with no electricity or running water ever permit reflection? Surely it does. There are always those domestic chores where the body goes on automatic and the mind is free to travel. Did she see me?
But still, why the strong reaction — an amalgam of joy and sorrow, an alchemy so complete that the emotion is something different from either. A sweet, strong ache in the solar plexus, a longing, a sense of loss and discovery all bound together so tightly that the breath comes short and only tears relieve the pressure.
As a trained actor, I’m well aware of the power of objects to trigger emotion. Yet when not on stage, when an object surprises me in the course of my daily activities, I’m astounded anew by the power such objects carry, power that we grant them through our imagination, power before which we are powerless.
I remember once when teaching at a university, a woman gave a speech that she titled Attach the Meaning — ATM. She urged us to go about our homes and attach the meaning to all those keepsakes that hang or sit in honored places or lie in some dusty corner or moldy cardboard box.
Attach the meaning so that the future generation coming across these precious treasures will know their significance, will have clues that solve the mystery that is the past of their ancestors, signposts that point them to knowing who they were, their dreams, fantasies, joys, sorrows, signposts that lead us finally to the knowing of self.
Like most of you, attaching the meaning to a lifetime of stuff is an enormous undertaking. Perhaps I’ll just have a family reunion and we’ll eat ourselves into oblivion. All families have recipes that have their own places in memory — my mother’s barbecue sauce, my aunt’s pecan pie, my uncle’s potato salad. So the plan is to eat and rummage through old boxes and trunks, retell the stories behind the rug hanging on the wall, our first purchase in Arabia, the ceramic cat, my first Valentine’s gift from my husband of 60 years, the delicate cup and saucer a good friend gave me for a special tea, and on and on.
Would my three grown sons be interested in all this? Hmmm, I don’t really know. But I don’t want the day to come when I’m gone and they come across my baby shoe or the piece of coral I found in Hawaii, look at it briefly, wonder momentarily about its place in our lives, and then toss it. Not that they must keep everything. No! But to pay brief homage, not to the object, but to the person who once cherished it, used it, cursed it, scrubbed it, painted it, recorded it, wrote it, gave meaning to it. Perhaps they’ll keep a few as daily reminders when time, space and circumstance separate them from their roots, feel the power of the past coming into the present for just a fleeting moment.
I washed my grandmother’s butter dish today and found her in me, found myself and saw briefly that grandchild who decades from now will wake up one day and know me through some object, but only if I attach the meaning.
