Ode to the doily — My grandmother’s things
Hers was an untimely death, sudden, at a young age. She left us memories so precious they couldn’t be talked about. Photos remained hidden, too sad to look at. Now, I find myself surrounded by things I found in my parents’ attic when they too passed away. It was two summers ago I brought them home, and I seem to know they belonged to her. A few story lines had been patched together, simple lines as if told on repeat, without much elaboration, decade by decade. My grandmother had come from Bruges, where her family made lace, married and moved to a village further West near Ypres. The things that remain now, her things, allude to these same stories.
In her kitchen she made remedies and pills, cooked stews over an open fire, and maintained her husband’s tools. He was a GP known for his brisk manner, for pulling teeth, for deliveries and amputations. The surgical instruments and glass syringes had to be placed in boiling water, powders carefully weighed for each set of pills. My grandmother’s scale and weights are now with us, so are her garden tools and the amber glass storage jars, in which she kept her remedies.
Her husband was often in a hurry though, not known for his patience. Most people made appointments to see him in his consultation room at the front. Others he sent round the back, to knock on the kitchen door. They were the patients with chronic ailments, depression, existential problems, that proved hard to treat. There they found my grandmother at work, and my great grandmother seated at the table with her rosary at hand.
What they stumbled upon too in this kitchen was stew and conversation. The open fire had a pan of ‘Hutsepot’ simmering for days or weeks on end, potatoes, turnips, cabbage and any kind of meat. My grandmother threw more meat into the pot on occasion, at least that is how the story goes. She added black pepper and nutmeg too, as I still do when I make Hutsepot in London. The chair my great grandmother used in this kitchen, I now keep in our attic.
Then came the arrival of plastic, celebrated in this household, the disposable syringes that made my grandmother’s life much easier. Celebrated indeed. She bought round lace doilies made out of plastic and placed them under flowerpots to decorate her home. Nobody thought it worth it to keep the doilies, even though this story wouldn’t be complete without them. It all ended suddenly, my grandmother was fixing the house, good with her hands as ever, nobody was around, it was an accident she couldn’t have foreseen. We never got to meet.
