Nonfiction by Sherri Wright
The earless pottery pig my daughter Jenny made in third grade and another creature with kitten ears, a bunny tail and a slit in the top for coins. A ceramic cat I bought in Dubrovnik on a trip with my kids. A white glass bird my husband brought me from Finland. I have lived in many houses. I have moved many times. I have purged. I have decluttered. These things have always come with me.
I have carried a gold dragonfly pin with blue and green enamel wings and red jewel eyes my first husband gave me when he returned from a job interview and told me we were moving. The second chink in our marriage. The first was the previous year when I was pregnant and he told me he didn’t get a PhD to stay home and care for a baby. In that same jewelry box is a coral shell necklace set with nine-year-old Jenny’s penciled note, “Mom, I bought it with my own $$.” And my grandmother’s gold bracelet which she had before she was married (in about 1912).
From Ithaca to Minneapolis to Washington DC and Rehoboth Beach I’ve moved an antique desk with eight turned ball feet and six drawers that I found in a junk shop in upstate New York. My arms have worn the warm cherry grain dull and the knob on the door is gone. But the white porcelain vase in the shape of a girl’s head remains. It was filled with white daisies when my friends sent it to me fifty-three years ago the day my daughter was born. It’s perfect for pencils, scissors, an antique brass letter opener, and multicolored pens and has marked my writing space wherever I’ve lived.
A blue and purple silk print dress that I wore for my second wedding in my parents’ backyard. After 37 years it still fits and so does the marriage.
My spiderman bathrobe in black velour with a burn out design. My grandson named it when he was into action heroes and wore Superman pajamas as we read together in bed. Now, standing in the morning sunshine I see the burn out has taken over the thinning velour and the sleeves are starting to fray. The boy who used to snuggle next to me in this robe has turned twenty.
I’ve carried grainy black and white portraits of my great-grandparents and a picture of their general store from the late 1800s. Also, the handwritten poems my great-grandmother wrote mourning the loss of two infants during an epidemic. They carried these photographs from New York to Indiana to Illinois to Minnesota before my father was born in 1916. I brought them back to the East Coast when I retired. I see when I pull them from the trunk in my guest room that the chalky portraits are faded. The ink on the poems is faint, the edges of the paper tattered and fragile.
I am eighty-one. The things I’ve carried—the pottery pigs, the wedding dress, the dragonfly pin, the glass birds, the photos and letters—will outlive me. They have no monetary value. But will they carry any sense of me?
Sherri Wright belongs to Rehoboth Beach Writers Guild and Key West Poetry Guild. She lives in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, where she practices yoga and volunteers for a local food rescue. Her work has appeared in The Bluebird Word, Rat’s Ass Review, Delaware Beach Life, Raven’s Perch, and Quartet.
