I know that things are just things. They have a way of cluttering our lives with "stuff." But some things are more important than others. Take the old Swedish coffee pot, pictured above. To most people it's just a silly coffee pot. To me, it is a memory of a childhood that was very good. It was my mother's way of taking on my father's Swedish ways, in spite of herself. Every morning, until drip coffee pots became "the thing," my mother cracked a raw egg into the coffee grounds to make Swedish coffee for my dad.
I inherited a coffee pot just like this when my mother died. She'd hauled it around with her even though life was harder than it had been when she was making coffee in this pot. Maybe it symbolized something for her; maybe she just liked it. No matter. When it became mine, I held onto it for dear life because it was one of the few pieces of my childhood that I could touch. It was a reminder that when I was growing up, life was gentle and good.
So when it ended up at Goodwill by mistake during one of my many moves during the late 1990s, I thought the world was going to come to an end. A call to Goodwill only an hour after the wrong box was dropped off there ended with the woman on the other end of the line saying, "I'm sorry but I don't see it."
Imagine my excitement when I was in Lindsborg, Kansas to visit family this summer and I saw a coffee pot just like the one I'd grown up with in a Swedish store labeled as "antique." I've never been an antique collector, but this came home with me. I didn't care how much I had to pay for it. It is a symbol of my heritage. It is a reminder of my family.
It's funny, the things that become important. There have been so many times in the past few years that I have thought about the coffee pot that got away. Every time I've thought about it I've felt silly for giving it such importance. But it's not just a coffee pot. It's a reminder of being a kid and of the little things my parents did for each other to show that they loved each other.
