Family "Heirlooms"

Just checked the word "heirloom" in the dictionary. The word suggests something of value - worth money - that is inherited.

Our family wasn't rich - but I recently came across three family - "heirlooms" - items that date back to my parents and grandparents. They have no monetary value - but they do have nostalgic meaning to me...

This frying pan is the one that my parents used as far back as memory takes me. I even remember my father replacing the wooden handle!

This "wash board" that my mother bought in her youth... and continued to use for hand laundry when she moved to Ottawa at the age of 83. She may have bought it in Edmonton before heading north to teach in the Peace River country when she was 19. (Or had she just turned 20?)

I see it was manufactured in Vancouver by a company that made brooms. Was it purchased a year or two later when she took the train to Vancouver to visit a young man she had met up north...?

I really know nothing about him. But occasionally my father would tease her about the man she almost married...

Did World War II intervene?

Finally, here is a towel my grandmother Olga Guhl - later Olga Bartz - wove (and embroidered) before she married my grandfather, Theodore Guhl.

A young girl kept busy weaving enough sheets and towels for a family, she once told me. We didn't wash sheets all winter long, she added. In spring, we'd take all the used bedding and head to the river, where we washed it on the rocks.

Where did you hang all that laundry? I remember asking her...

On the bushes, she replied.

There they are! My heirlooms: Ordinary household objects - and the stories that came with them!