Cedar Chest Redux

When I departed Saginaw as a seventeen-year-old in the late 1980s, I wanted a cedar chest. Honestly, I wanted a hope chest. Like the women in the Laura Ingalls Wilder stories, I wanted a cedar chest to hold household linens: embroidered napkins and sheets, hand knit throws, a homemade quilt, and crocheted pillow cases. I wanted linens that would last a lifetime and go with some mythical china and crystal in my future.

I left Saginaw with a footlocker from K-Mart, a set of cotton/poly blend sheets for an extra long twin (what was in the dorms at Michigan) and navy blue towels, all purchased from K-Mart. My mother said the footlocker was just like her cedar chest (shown in the photograph below). I knew that it was not. Moving every year for the next five years, at least, however, I did not miss the cedar chest. There is little from those early days of my young adulthood that is still in my possession. I would like to think that I would have carefully moved that cedar chest during those tumultous years. Still, it seems unlikely.

When I leave Saginaw at the end of the month (we will begin our trip on Women’s Equality Day), my mother’s cedar chest will follow in the portable uHaul storage container. It will be delivered down the ridiculously long driveway in mid-September. I will have in our new home my mother’s cedar chest and my grandmother’s cedar chest.

The cedar chest seems like an anachronism. Does anyone still receive one as a gift in her young womanhood? Do young women gather sheets and napkins and table cloths and quilts and save them for a future family? Does anyone embroider? Crochet? Quilt? Sew? In truth, sheets and napkins are more disposable than they ever were for my grandmother and my mother. Who has a quilt that lasts a lifetime?

Am I yearning for a time that has passed? A time that will never turn? Perhaps. The cedar chests will not carry the linens of my future. I do not know where they will sit in the new house (I have not seen it yet; it is hard to imagine occupying let alone decorating a house I have never seen), nor do I know what will be inside them. I do know that they will be some type of a connection to my past.

I can appreciate that the era of cedar chests may be over. Young women may not have them; they may not want them. That is fine, each generation deserves its own talisman, its own objects to fill with hopes and dreams and desires. What vexes me is: who will care for these two cedar chests when I am gone?

My mother’s cedar chest with some of Tibe’s toys beneath it.