A Basketful of Broken Things

Return to site

May 21, 2021

The days of just being. When you neither judged nor cared. As long as you were with your mother, all was well. Blithely I’d while away the hours accompanying her on the endless visits that were made in those days between mothers, families, friends and elders. So it came that I was often a visitor to Aunt Bessie’s house, usually with Mother, or with mother’s sister and her daughter - my cousin - where we join together in the sacred world of girls. Even though our mothers were old, and Aunt Bessie was crinkly and gray, we were all girls together.

Aunt Bessie’s son John worked at the Post Office and we called him Uncle John. Uncle John’s “apartment” was upstairs. Mostly the boys and fathers went up there when the families would gather for a barbecue on the weekends. Sometimes we girls went up there to use the second bathroom in the house when the downstairs bathroom door was shut. It wasn’t an apartment really. There was a small guest bedroom, next to the bathroom at the top of the stairs. Then to the right of the bathroom was Uncle John’s large room, big enough for a bed under the eaves along the back wall. Most of the room was devoted to Uncle John’s living room which had a TV for the boys to watch whatever game was on.

On those quiet days when Uncle John was at the Post Office, and fathers were at work, and older brothers and sisters at school, my aunt with my cousin would pick up my Mother and me for a visit to Aunt Bessie’s. The ladies would have iced tea when it was warm and hot tea when it was cold. My cousin and I were offered milk and lemon cookies dusted with sugar, which we ate at the dining room table. After our snack, we waited patiently until Aunt Bessie brought the basket out from the back of the coat closet.

The basket was of brown, thick, woven twigs, like something out of a fairy tale. The basket contained a treasure trove of trinkets that Aunt Bessie had collected over the years. She shared her most precious objects with us, so we knew we were special: wooden spools, a bent spoon, a silver thimble that we could slip on and mold and remold to our fingers, a fan, tiny wooden furniture, small dolls of fabric with stitched faces and strange clothes. Aunt Bessie told us one doll was from Ukraine. Was Ukraine very far from Richmond, we wondered? And there were a dozen or more tiny china figurines - a cocker spaniel, a piano, a dutch shoe, a mandarin’s slipper, a unicorn. All random things to delight a child were collected here in the basket. A buffalo nickel, an ornately carved clothes peg, a crystal drawer pull, “Ben Franklin’s” very own glasses but with no lenses - all were in the basket. We didn’t know who Mr. Franklin was but he must have been important for Aunt Bessie to have his eyeglasses.

Looking back, I realize there was no plastic. Consumer plastics were only beginning to take hold when I was a girl. I suppose, this explains why only items of wood, metal and glass could be found in the sacred basket. Turning each totem over in my small palms, holding them up with my fingers toward the light, I can still feel the glowing warmth of the wood, the steely cold of the metal and the delicate hardness of the glass.

On a hot summer day, with the exhaust fan humming in the window, to sit on Aunt Bessie’s living room floor alongside my cousin in the cooling breeze among these treasures was a childhood nirvana. We were too young then for interactive play, but side by side, our dresses touching, we’d create our kingdoms. We each had our favorite pieces and then we’d ask one another and be loaned pieces to complete whatever story we were telling. We did not know about competing or hoarding. The basket’s cornucopia of delights fostered only generosity and cooperation.

Aunt Bessie was a sweet and gentle creature. Uncle John was all right too, but he was a boy. But since I knew he helped get our mail delivered he was special. I knew that delivering the mail was a very important job, because my father always asked Uncle John when would he would be delivering that million dollar check that Daddy was expecting any day now. Mailmen sometimes brought million dollar checks in the mail apparently. I was not sure what a check was at the time, but it must have been important.

Back then from my point of view, I knew that boys liked to get dirty and take things apart. But again it was without any real judgment. That’s just how it was. I had two older brothers and my cousin had two older brothers. We knew they liked to make messes and destroy things. Except fathers, of course. When boys grew up they became fathers and our fathers were good and beyond reproach. My father said he’d been very naughty and tricky when he was young. He assured me that all boys grew out of that, that there were some things that boys just needed to do.

The ladies were not without their foibles as well. My cousin and I couldn’t understand half the things they said and I could not understand how they could sit still and talk for hours and hours?

Ladies’ chatter and boys’ messes retreated and faded away when the basket appeared, always bathed in the imaginary sunbeam that my eye bestowed upon it as it made its way, Aunt Bessie gripping the handle, from the closet hovering above the shining floor and onto the braided rug in the middle of the living room floor where we’d play.

Years and years later returning to Richmond for Uncle John’s funeral, I went to the home I hadn’t visited for many years. Having gone to college and moved away, I only saw Uncle John at my family’s home at the annual Thanksgiving feast my mother hosted. To my surprise, our family was offered many of their personal effects. We were invited to the home one last time to see if there was anything we wanted before the estate sellers arrived to dispose of everything. I was given Uncle John’s gold ring and Uncle John’s gold watch, picked out for me by whom, I have no idea.

Walking into the house, I looked around at the familiar furniture, the lamps, the old rug, neat as a pin as ever, but well worn. How could a home be so unchanged in 30 years? I felt their presence keenly - these two institutions of my early childhood. Uncle John could come down the stairs or Aunt Bessie could emerge from kitchen, removing her apron at any minute, ready to entertain us.

I asked about the basket of treasures. Was it still in the coat closet? No one knew. I opened the closet and fished through wool coats, mildly redolent of must and mothballs. A scent I never associated with the basket ever. Magically the basket was indeed still there. Suddenly, I was transported 25 years and ready for play.

Staring in the basket, I sank to my knees before the closet and had to laugh, not a raucous laugh, but the self-deprecating chuckle that I’ve developed for when I catch myself out. Yes, I got it just a bit wrong again. Everything in the basket was either chipped, broken or missing some part. A dog with no leg, a doll with one eye, the the tip of the unicorn’s horn was chipped, the piano pedal was gone. Who in the world would let their kids play with this stuff? But perhaps I was one of many children, not the only child, who must have amused herself with this basket of treasures over the years. Just because I grew up and moved away, didn’t mean that the basket did not keep coming out. But had those kids that came after done all the breaking? Had my cousin and I? Again I had to laugh at myself, for I understood the truth of the basket.

Aunt Bessie’s basket of treasures had always been full of broken things. In fact that must have been a requirement to be included. But we children without our judgment and valuing nothing by its monetary worth saw only the magic. Their brokenness was not only unnoticeable but was perhaps to us even strange and exotic. Here we were given a virtual treasure trove of things that adults would cast away. “Take anything you’d like,” I heard, followed by a somewhat hollow laugh. I’m sure no one could imagine that I would want the whole basket.

Taking less than I want has always been a failing of mine. So instead of rushing to the car with the entire basket, I picked through the broken things and found the dutch shoe, the mandarin slipper and the little piano. These I took and have with me. The three relics sit upon a little shelf in my bedroom where I can see them every day. And they will never find their way into my own basket. For yes, I have my own basket of broken things where I stow my own discarded treasures. My basket of broken things is tucked away in a closet and is added to occasionally. Woven of willow branches, my own basket waits for that time, should there ever be such a time, when a young girl will find her own heart’s delight among the contents of its sacred ark.