What the Ancestors Left Behind

When it was time to sell the old house, no one fought over the copper turbotière.

Battered, tarnished, 200 years old, big as a suitcase.   No one wanted the oversized salmon poacher either.   Or the furry carving utensils made from animal legs.   Or those nifty shears for severing chicken ligaments.  Or the latticed copper chauffe-lit  for hot bricks to warm your bed.

Instruments of our ancestors.  Single purposed,  space consuming,  dust collecting “things” no one needs anymore. 

We welcomed them all.   

John is amazingly fearless when it comes to old tools.   A 3 kilo, rhombus shaped  turbot?    No problem. 

Haul the pan out of its sleep, rinse it down with a hose, poach the fish in an herb seasoned bouillon using a recipe his mother got from her grandmother.   After the feast for a multitude, wash it in a baby basin outside and set it back with its colleagues in the dark room dedicated to jars of jam, tomato sauce, copper pots and spiders.  

The salmon poacher dates from the time when salmon was so abundant in the Dordogne, the servants complained about eating it every day.   Now a worn, weathered  thing, it fed twenty mouths per meal in its heyday. 

I must admit, the hammered copper  bassine à confiture for jam-making required some bartering.   A large, coveted bauble, designed for cooking sugary substances over several hours.    Useful if you have an orchard. 

When I see John stirring cherry confiture in this heirloom, I also see his mother stirring in the old kitchen; her mountainous bags of sugar on the scorched linoleum counter, her hands waving away the flies, her old scale with the copper weights that our naughty children pilfered for toys and promptly lost in the gravel. 

And I see them both one June day long ago, arguing about sugar.

He wanted to reduce the sugar by 50 %.   She said, “Preposterous!   Equal weight fruit to sugar.   We have always done it that way!”   

So they had a contest.   Family members crept in and out of the hot, steaming, simmering, sugary kitchen all afternoon to witness the jelly feud.  

The next morning we gathered as she vehemently and victoriously slid two competing jars across the table and glowered:

“Here.   Try some of John’s  SOUP!”

We all took spoons.   

Her jar:   Perfect consistency.  Delicious.  Glycemic index off the charts.

His jar :   Soupy indeed.  Delicious.  Suitable for diabetics. 

Soup or non soup, all one hundred jars were happily consumed that winter. 

Today, someone evokes that story whenever we pull out the old jam-making pot. 

All these “things.”

It’s dizzying.   All these things printed with stories retold over generations… 

When you say adieu to a home, you live the last gong of the dinner bell, the last claque of a doorknob, the last lingering intake of the breath of the spirits there.   You wonder what will happen to them.  The ones in the stones who whispered to you.   Who entered your dreams.  Who took you into the spider filled, abandoned places where they once laughed and wept and drank and cooked; who allowed you for a while into their long ago lives.  

In the course of time and change, dusty unused places become varnished and sealed over. No longer quiet places for ghosts, but gleaming new places for the living.  

I too am in a gleaming new place, bursting at the seams with new life,  small children everywhere, buzzing about like ecstatic doodlebugs.  Life so exuberantly flows through their little limbs.   They are my joy.   They are the present and the future.  

Nevertheless, I’m glad we carry the ancestor’s tools.  

Just as humans and trees and insects are instruments for life to flow through until the Flow moves elsewhere  – so these instruments are imbued with our ancestor’s spirits.      They waken with the cherries, with the turbot…   And we have a nice visit.   

Then they return to sleep on the shelves in their dark, quiet place.

When someday I am in my own dark, quiet place,  I will await the footsteps of a grandchild padding about the orchard in June.  I shall trail behind to witness the filling of the copper pot and the tending of simmering fruit and the sweet jam spooned up for the winter’s morning toast. 

And when they stir those cherries, maybe they will think of us.  

Ancestors.