and from Pandora’s box….an appeasement perhaps?

Nanny’s Hope Chest

By: Debbie Necessary Gibson

2006

” And from Pandora’s box spilled a host of evils, but one thing remained……………..”

Nanny died at eighty-six. No bones about it, she was my favorite grandparent, and I, her favorite grandchild. No bones about that either. I inherited from her a spice of temperament, a whole host of knick-knacks, a recipe box, and a cedar chest known as “Nanny’s Hope Chest.”

Upon its creation, it was a masterpiece of shining wooden beauty. By the time I inherited it, it had become an eyesore that was cast aside by my mother and sister as a reject that paled in comparison to the luster of an emerald cut diamond, and a very perfect amethyst of purple majesty.

Dented, scarred, scratched, and bumped it found its way over the mountain in the back of a 1983 Silverado pick-up that had seen its better days also. Four men of ample, bulging, muscle moved it into its new and permanent location, the foot of my matrimonial bed.

Everyone in the house was curious regarding the contents. I dodged their requests, for it seemed to me that whatever treasures were housed there were first mine for the taking, and should the lid be shut to secrets, well then, they would be whispered only to me. The lid stayed locked, and I became the keeper of the key. A key which I hid from curious voyeurs wishing to peek into the window of Nanny’s life. No one would see Nanny’s nakedness until I did.

The day finally came when everyone I shared home with fled the premises. I finally had scrounged a block of time when no interlopers would be peeking over my shoulder, and I retrieved the key from its hiding place in my underwear drawer. I knew it was safe there, for no child, and only a very anxious husband would dare to sift through big-girl bloomers to find anything, much less the key to the chest of Nanny’s secrets.

As I inserted the key into the lock, it occurred to me that I might walk away from this afternoon of rummaging with a very different understanding of the woman I had loved and adored. Gathering my breath, and placing it in the hand of courage, I turned the key.

The colors assaulted my senses. Handkerchiefs, beaded purse, leather gloves, satin handmade undergarments, old perfume bottles, and boxes upon boxes of letters wrapped in ribbons and catalogued by year, and newspapers from historic moments both worldly and personal. Woody and aromatic, the smell of my grandmother’s life crawled up my nostrils, and found its way to my heart. Here were the “important ” things, the treasures worth fondling, the dreams worth keeping.

As I broke the bread of her life, a shudder went through me. I knew not if it was anticipation, fear, or the ghost that I had inhaled upon opening the lid. Goosebumps rose on my arms. Quickly, I shook the feeling, and opened the first batch of letters, untying a pink ribbon. These were the letters of suitors and potential husbands, boys with an eye for a slim, tiny redhead with an attitude and wiggle to match. They seemed childish and immature to me, but they also represented the sexual yen of a young adolescent woman who knew she had something the opposite sex desired. ” Meet me at Wilson’s Drugstore and we’ll share a malt, one glass, two straws.” a boy named Wilfred had written. Wilfred? Who the hell would name a boy Wilfred? I am glad she never married him.

The next batch of letters, twined in green ribbon, represented the first true love of her life, the man whom she would marry. The man who would sire my mother, and run off into an alcoholic sunset with another woman, and forget he ever loved a girl named Louise and child named Barbara. I had never met him in real life, he effectively disappeared from all our lives. One by one I read the letters of his intent, the anticipation of marital bliss he had, the yearning for home he expressed while away at war, and I read every manipulative word he wrote to sway my grandmother from pity and into the recognition that she had married a con, a man who loved a woman for the gifts she could give to him in the form of cash. When he did not get his way he grew caustic, mean, surly, hateful and self-absorbed. He may have helped create my mother, but I hated him, and I never even knew him.

The next letters were works of poetic wonder. Another had pursued her. He was a writer, a dreamer, a visionary, a self-educated man, whose lack of diploma had no bearing on his intelligence. I fell in love with him too, and had I not known that at fifty-eight he would shoot himself and die an alcoholic, I would have thought that life could have been complete with this man.

The next packet was bundled in purple, all of them were letters from me. Written in block print and progressing into a swirling, fanciful adolescent script, the young dreams and dreary chronicling of a small me to a tall me. She had kept every letter I had ever written. I heard her voice on the far end of the phone saying, ” Remember to write me, it makes me so happy to check the mail and see your handwriting.”

I felt the hot tears rise in my throat, and I began to empty with a fury the contents of the entire chest. I fondled the cedar-scented items, and built around myself a bed of memorabilia. Hours passed and I could not shake myself from the task, the task of paying homage to one I loved. Several hours passed as I read and re-read her correspondence, and imagined a time when you made your own bra and panties in home economics, and you hung your dreams on a whimsy dressed in love. I went back to a time when war ravaged the earth, and every kiss was a potential last kiss. I scooped up as much of her essence as I could, and then I packed every memory, every letter, every cedar -scented memento back into the box.

It amazed me that one so buoyant, so full of cheer and delight, one so positive and full of elan, could have become all that in the face of all this. I have never unlocked the chest again, not since the day I floated on her dreams and drowned in her despairing sea. Since that day, the key has rested in the left hand corner of my underwear drawer. Her secrets are safe with me. Only two know the secrets housed in hope chest…only me and the ghost I inhaled, the day I turned the key.