Front Porch: Emotional link sets value of heirlooms

HEIRLOOM: A valuable object that has belonged to a family for several generations.

What do we do with our heirlooms?

The closest thing I have to an heirloom is a 40-inch by 26-inch oil painting of a woodland scene by German artist M. Berner-Hardt that my grandmother rolled up and took with her when she fled her home to come to America.

It was 1946 in post-World War II Berlin. Her small cottage was in the Russian sector of the city and was confiscated by the authorities. She was allowed to remain in the home while Russian military officers were housed there, and, I suppose, she was required to cook for them and do general housekeeping as well.

When Americans began being allowed to bring relatives out of Germany, her son (my father), living in New York City, put the money together, with the help of other relatives, to pay for his mother’s fare to America.

Her daughter, who lived in Berlin’s British sector and who worked in a hospital there, died suddenly of an unknown (to me at least) illness just before my grandmother was to leave for America to be reunited with the son she had only seen once in the nearly 20 years since he immigrated to America.

She was emotionally distraught and also frightened, having heard stories about things reportedly happening to German nationals at the hands of some Russians who occupied German homes. Though I never heard word that she had been mistreated, her fear grew, and so she gathered a few possessions and crept out during the night, to hide with friends for a few days before she departed from Germany.

She also brought with her a large wall hanging tapestry that had belonged to her daughter, Erika.

I was an infant when all this was happening, and I remember hearing when I was a little older that Oma had brought the painting with her from Germany, though I hardly paid attention at the time. I learned a scant few details later on from my mother, who was the painting’s in-law, so to speak, and not herself deeply informed about its provenance and meaning to her husband’s family.

My grandmother died when I was 8 and my father died when I was in my 20s, so by the time I developed real curiosity about the painting’s history, there was no one to ask about it.

The painting hung in the living room above the couch in our family home. After my father died and my mother moved to Spokane, where my husband and I lived, it hung over a couch in her den. And at her death, it came to me, and it has been on the wall of my dining room ever since. We did have some restoration work done on it, as it had begun to show cracks and needed cleaning.

Erika’s tapestry portraying three deer and a few trees was displayed on the wall over the bed in my grandmother’s room when I was little. It’s now on a wall above the stairs that go down to the lower level of our daylight rancher house.

As a child I would stare at the oil painting and imagine where the path through the woods might lead. The deer in the tapestry fascinated me. I was a city girl, and I thought they were so pretty. These two pieces of art were things for my imagination to dance with.

But as an adult, my thoughts and questions about them are different. Of all the things my grandmother could have taken with her from a lifetime in Germany, why that painting? Surely it wasn’t an easy thing for an older woman to carry with her, even rolled up. What meaning did it have for her? And of her daughter’s possessions, why that tapestry?

I’ll never know.

And while these items are technically not several generations old, to be properly considered heirlooms, they are mine nevertheless. And while my sons know as much about them factually as I do, they do not particularly have emotional attachments to them.

This is not uncommon. A friend who has a beautiful china tea service that is a genuine antique and heirloom, has no one in her family who has any interest in having it. I could name any number of heirlooms I know of and friends who have them, who have no designated place or person interested in them.

No aspersions are being cast here. It’s just the way it is. Our precious things, our treasures are just that – ours, and pretty much ours alone.

And even when there is understanding and sentimentality across the generations, our heirlooms often don’t work well into the lives of our children and heirs. Art is very subjective. What one person appreciates, another doesn’t. I recall a painting of an orange-clad toreador on black velvet that I was once given, that resided inside a closet until such (fortunately rare) occasion that the giver came to town, when it was put briefly on display for the visit.

We have one son who works from home and travels the world in so doing. I can’t imagine him strapping a big oil painting to his back as he moves about. And another son in Seattle whose art tastes probably don’t include a large woodland scene as a first choice, but who might find a spot for it if he had the wall space.

If these things had value, our heirs could sell them or we could arrange to donate them somewhere. But they really don’t, so they will be yard sale items or given away or tossed.

That’s just how it is.

What to do with our heirlooms? Enjoy them. And let the rest go.