Mom's Desk

Brown Pitcher, photo collection of Midge Frazel

Mom's Desk

Connecting the photos in my photo collection to each other is something I am hoping to accomplish in this writing challenge. Since furniture in my family has been passed from generation to generation, I have been "stuck" not only with an endless stream of photographs but also with furniture and household furnishings that have been passed to me. What to keep and what to sell? It has been a terrible task. I have no idea what happened to Mom's desk shown in this photo in the collage above. I honestly only remember the telephone being there. I do remember this photo of me and I think I am holding "Miss Comfort" a sock doll made by my grandmother for me. (I am all about being comfortable.) Oddly, I can tell you that my Mom washed her hair just before this photo was taken.

The photo below is a very small one in my family collection.. The furniture shown in the below in the photo below was definitely given to my mother as it belonged to her grandparents but I did not notice that the desk was in this photo until I started to write this blog post. The blog post was supposed to be about the drip edge brownware pitcher that mom had on the desk and I have kept all these years. I also owned the fireplace tools in the photo but I left them behind in Bridgewater because our house here and my daughter's house too both have the modern gas fireplace which doesn't need tending.

Charles and Adah (Evans) Stewart's last residence, photo collection of Midge Frazel

How do you decide what to keep and what to give away and how do you make peace in your mind with your decisions? I kept the brown pitcher not because it was valuable but because it was part of "The Plat" idea  of research and because it easily fits in with my new house. 

I think that much of the family heirlooms that I kept belonged to my great grandparents and I am happy with my decision to keep them. Grandmother Ada was the one that had the Quaker ancestors and I think she lacked items to inherit since she was raised by a step-mother who outlived her father. She might have loved the fancy lifestyle of my Connecticut family. 

I am happy to have the brown pitcher no matter what its value because I remember it from my early childhood days in "The Plat".