GOING THROUGH CLOSETS -

A COVID PROJECT - my soap collection

Hello, classmates, from our family home in northeastern Pennsylvania,
Jim Smith and I left our condo in the DC area and came up country in March, when the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History closed to scientists and the public. I couldn’t bring my fossils but did bring the paper I am working on; country living turns out to be calming and conducive to writing.

The family home is a cottage built by my grandfather in 1921, and it has many long, narrow closets filled by various family members over the past 90 years. Grand daughter Charlotte, 6, is the only one small enough to squeeze into these closets and pull out the contents. One contained five canisters of Great Aunt Maria’s novelty soap collection, including 75 pieces representing, animals, storybook characters, clowns and food (see below). A second closet was stuffed with my mother’s Japanese flower arranging containers used for ikibana, brought home from Japan when my parents came for our graduation. Another closet yielded several bags of antique cookie cutters, probably left from when mothers and grandmothers took time to roll out multiple batches of cookies for the holidays. If I feel brave in December, I shall mix up dough and let the grandchildren experience cutting out and decorating cookies in the shapes of trees, birds or whatever.

I am realizing the generations coming up will have no idea how such things got here, but I am not sure I should get rid of them. Perhaps they should go back in the closets and wait 50 years for the next explorers. Then too, there are three more closets I haven’t even checked out.