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This blog is about heirlooms. You know, those things that loom in the back of the closet and to which you were heir? Like the Victorian silver tea service you have never used, but which, once upon a time years ago, you thought maybe you would so you kept only to have lately come to realize that now, in order to use it, you would have to spend approximately a hundred hours rubbing off three decades worth of tarnish?

Why do we have these things? Why do we annoy each successive generation with their care and/or neglect? I have a theory: Because the preceding one did it to us. I see it now, my sweet little old Irish granny resignedly buffing that damn tea service (she was a lot more committed to the “care” part then I am) thinking, “At least when I’m dead this will be someone else’s job. Hm. Let me think...which one of my grandkids has pissed me off lately?” Unfortunately the answer was often the same. And so here I am, trapped by tradition and affection to the care and feeding of a not particularly good-looking five piece silver tea set.

I don’t think about that silver elephant too often, but I had cause to do so this week when I was checking out the bridal registry for a friend’s kid and noticed silver on her Wish List. Somehow I managed to resist the urge to call this kid and ask why she would do this to the unborn generations that will probably follow her soon to be hallowed union? Still, reading her list led my thoughts down my home’s stairway to the long corridor that ends next to the laundry room, and into the deep lonely closet that holds in its musky interior the accumulated detritus of my ancestors. And that led me to thinking about the people who had willed this crap to me, my Great-Uncle Dan and Grandma Francis, my mom and mother-in-law, my grandmother-in-law and my brother, and my dear friend, Judy.

And maybe that’s the point. This stuff is the touchstone between me and my past, between me and people I knew intimately and some who I never knew at all. So I guess I will keep it all, all the junk, my best friend’s crystal decanter, my great-uncle’s broken train set, the cashmere sweater that has a small moth hole in it that my grandfather brought back from World War One, and tend the memories if not the things themselves.

Besides, I’m sort of pissed off at one of my nieces right now and I’m thinking of willing her that tea set…

How about you? What things have you been doomed to take care of for the rest of your life until you can pawn it off on some unsuspecting relative with your last breath? Or do you honor the past by putting to use those things past generations have bequeathed you? And if so, what are they because they’ve got to be a whole lot more useful then mine.. Tell me. You know you want to…