I just finished wrapping a
small package and will soon head to the Post Office to get it in today's mail
for my 89 year old aunt in East Tennessee.
It's a silver demitasse cup which she may or may not use. It doesn't matter to me whether she uses it
or not because the gift is more about
memories than practicality.
This particular aunt was a
constant in daily life as I grew up. She
was unable to have children and to fill that void she chose several of her
nieces to share parts of her life with as they matured. I was one of those nieces. She lived within the city limits of Sneedville; I lived on a small farm 7 miles from town. In
high school I saw her daily as our high school librarian; on the farm she often dropped by to chat or
to leave small gifts for our family. Sometimes it would be a couple of
magazines or her church bulletins; other times it would be food or some trinket
that she found and wanted to give to us.
While I often read everything
she left, it was the small trinkets that often caught my eye. They were not
necessarily expensive and sometime I wondered why she had chosen a particular trinket.
When asked about it she simply said,
"I thought this was cute," or "This made me think of
you." Mama, the most practical
minded woman I ever knew, saw these gifts as 'childish' because they weren't
usable from her viewpoint. Often her comments were, "Just another piece to
sit around and collect dust." Sometimes Mama even made these comments in front of her, but she rarely responded
back or tried to explain the gift she had given.
I still have a few of these
'trinket' pieces and run across them from time to time. There is the Joan Walsh Anglund figurine which went with a book she gave me,
and there are some Christmas ornaments, but the ones I liked best were the miniature
dishes that she insisted we use to 'sip our hot tea' or a small decorative
plate that we used to serve our freshly made cookies. She and I often found
occasions to use some of these trinkets and to enjoy our experience a great
deal. Sometimes we pretended to be
people we weren't or shared a laugh or two about some 'too critical'
family member.
The demitasse cup gift that I
will mail today to my Aunt Fay is a shiny bright red cup and saucer similar to
one she once gave me. I also bought one
of these cups for myself. In the box is
a small note that simply says, "This made me think of you." The next time I visit her I hope to once again
share hot tea together with our special cups.
