I sat down today to look at my silver.  I have two sets now– my mother’s tarnished silver, which I inherited last year when she died, and my mother-in-law’s set, which she gave me after her daughter and son said they didn’t want it. My in-laws are moving from their home of more than 30 years, passing on and throwing away bits and pieces of their past.

My mother’s set is incomplete and very plain– “Hannah Hull” is the style, and like my mother was, it is very practical and unadorned.  It came in a beautiful dark, wooden box with my mother’s initials– JNH–in felt on the inside of the lid.  My mother-in-law’s set is more delicate and has fine ornamentation– nothing ostentatious– and I feel it is more like me. The box it comes in is cleanly organized, but the bottom is falling out, and my plan was to switch the two sets so that my mother-in-law’s set is in my mother’s box.

The flimsy box has a pamphlet in it from the early 50’s when my mother-in-law got married.  “The Care of Your Silver” from the International Silver Company of Meriden, Connecticut.  It is basically an advertisement for International Silver Polish.  There is also a small card from some relatives– “A Wedding Gift” with a blonde bride in flowing white half obscuring the groom’s face.  A small silver insert shows through the cut-out church window and the inside reads: “To shower you with wishes / For happy years together, / And sunshine always in your hearts / No matter what the weather!”

It is raining today.  It has been raining since last night, and it is cool for July 4th.  The room I sit in is filled with the few possessions I brought back from my mother’s apartment in New Mexico a year and a half ago.  I have a picture of her and my dad on their wedding day framed and sitting on the dresser here. They look like teenagers to me in that picture, so young and so thin and so innocent.  This room also holds the files of my late husband– the paperwork he had in his apartment when he died.  His ashes still sit in the box from the funeral home.

I look at the wedding card and the silver in my mother-in-law’s box and I look at my mother’s plain and sturdy silver on the floor next to it, and I start to cry.  I wonder if those women– both married in the fifties– felt that the weight and richness of this silver would sustain their marriages?  The idea of marriage seems so simple in these images from the 50’s– get a husband, get a set of silver, have children– and everything else will fall into place!  My husband and I shunned these kinds of gifts when we were getting married– saw them as materialistic and unnecessary.  But how many times have I wished I had this nice heavy silverware for my table!  It seems so solid and long-lasting– is that what my marriage lacked?  Tradition?  Stability?

My mother, with her no-nonsense approach to life, left my father when I was thirteen, thumbing her nose at the 1950’s era model of family life and insisting that women don’t need a man in their lives to be happy.  For her, the weight of the silver was a burden that connected her to her past– the snobby east coast, Vassar, and her parents’ expectations.  She lived alone in New Mexico for twenty years, painting the landscape and smoking like a chimney until her silver became tarnished from lack of use and the box it came in became sticky from the bacon-greased, cigarette smoky air of her apartment.

My mother-in-law’s silver is clean and polished.  We used it at Thanksgiving and Christmas dinners for the 20 years she hosted them.  How can she part with it?  I do know that her heart was not always filled with sunshine in the almost 60 years she has been married.  But the silver served her well.  That I cannot deny.  She has taught me more about love than anyone else in my life.

And did my mother’s austerity serve her well?  I think I am crying because I do not believe it did.  I see my mother’s plain silver and remember her eyes rolling at other people’s frivolity. Then I remember her cramped and dirty apartment, so far from the people who loved her, and I wish, instead, that she had used the silver, polished it, laid it out on the table and invited us in for dinner.  She was not meant to be June Cleaver, that I know.  But I wish she had not shut herself away in a box.

So, I will take her silver out of the box and I will put my mother-in-laws silver in.  I will take my mother’s no-nonsense grit and strength as I navigate my own years of loneliness since my husband’s death. I will take my mother-in-law’s delicate, well-used silver and I will use it– that’s all– just USE it, to serve my children a meal when they are home.  To share food with good friends.  To be with people with love.