Yes, I know that I can’t take any of my treasures into the next world. And yes, I’ve been slowly sorting and purging. At least of the easy stuff: jam and jelly jars; abandoned clothes; a couple unused aspirationally-acquired appliances. In other words, items lacking any emotional power. But there are those untouched trunks and keepsake boxes and file drawers. And two aprons.
Aprons were an unremarkable part of my growing up. My sister and I spread everyday aprons over our laps when we ate meals in our school clothes—and then stuffed them back into the tea towel drawer for the next meal. I wore a fancier apron when I gave my “award-winning” 4-H flavored biscuit demonstration (biscuits with a sugar cube dipped in orange juice insides; biscuits made with cheese, etc.). Mother put on a sensible skirt apron when she had to help cook a college banquet or manage a church wedding reception—over top of her Sunday clothes. Daddy donned a blue-flowered bib apron on Kiwanis pancake day.
In fact, our home on Ash Street had a bureau drawer full of aprons: lacy, sturdy, full-length, half-length, gifts, homemade. Two delicate, sheer aprons that godparents Helen and Mike purchased for us during our one visit to Marshall Fields in Chicago. Those were wrapped in tissue paper, tucked into lovely little boxes—appropriate for the magic of a multi-storied department store. There were wedding gifts to Mother from her teaching friends. A couple from her home in Iowa. And the ludicrous apron I made in freshman home economics: a square of cloth hemmed and folded over on top (a casing) to hold a circular, flexible plastic ring—that went around my waist.
When my sister and I sorted through our childhood home, I ignored the apron drawer. I don’t know where its contents went. But here in Montana, I acquired two: a burgundy polka-dot bib number that I wore every Christmas Day when the girls were little—always over a white blouse and blue jumper while Dave styled in his red tie and white broadcloth shirt and jeans. Our nod to festivity and practicality. Later, Dave gave me a more sedate beige and blue corduroy apron. I’ve never worn it. Those two aprons traveled with me from our Choteau Street house to a hook in the closet of this condo. They haven’t moved since.
Aprons come from a world where women didn’t own many dresses and needed to make them last. Aprons made sense when we cooked and baked from scratch, canned and gardened, did laundry with wringer washers and blueing tubs, when we cleaned and fed babies and chased after toddlers. An apron made from sturdy material, maybe scraps—saved the outfit underneath. And was—truth be told—the badge of a good, industrious homemaker. A symbol of women’s role and skill.
Even as a kid, I puzzled over the four decorative painted plates that Mother commissioned from her friend Corinne. They were in colors to match our tiny, unfunctional kitchen. Despite—or in the face of—Mother’s decades-long teaching career and fierce independence, the plates depicted late nineteenth-century women at work: sweeping, cooking, baking, and sewing. Complete with aprons.
Maybe maybe, I’ll donate the corduroy apron I’ve never worn. And remember to wear the polka-dot one for our family New Year’s dinner. A nod to the past that Amanda will know. A nod to this ubiquitous, ordinary part of my youth. Maybe, in the bitter-sweet goodbyes of sorting, I can also part with three of those four painted plates with their busy, aproned Victorian matrons.
Maybe that’s all I can do in each round of sorting: remembering and then relinquishing SOME, but not all, of a given keepsake. Yielding up to the gods of memory just a portion of my treasures. ©
*ANAs, you remember, are just small thoughts, kind-of isolated ones!
