Today's topic is orphaned objects. (Jesse, leftover from yesterday, was actually an orphan when he hurled himself at our bedroom window three summers ago, and so he too belongs with this group.) On the right hand page at the top left is a pretty beveled glass mirror that had been abandoned in my grandparents' house when my family cleared out their furniture and other things before renting the house out to us while the estate was being settled. When we left to move on three years later, I helped myself to the mirror. It had been hung on the bathroom wall with picture wire and a nail, probably in the early 1900s when my grandparents bought the house. I tried to strip the paint off, thinking I would find beautiful old wood underneath; but the frame of the mirror turned out to be made of plaster.
The three containers were all abandoned by various visiting daughters-in-law. The two on the top are a set: blonde hair shampoo and conditioner, which blonde Maya likes to use when she spends the night here. The one on the bottom is conditioner to tame frizzy hair, which none of them has. It's almost full, so I hold onto it in the event that someday a curly-haired guest will find it.
The drawings on this page are of kitchen orphans. On the let is my other grandmother's big enameled spoon. It was left in her house after she died, and I was staying in her house a few months later and found the spoon in an otherwise empty cabinet. I took it home, planning to use it. But the throat of the spoon is bare of enamel and is rusted and weak. So I hung it on the wall over our sink, next to the other object. This object is a pair of ice tongs from the days when people had ice delivered to their kitchens for their ice boxes. We found the tongs under the sink in our old house in Indiana when we were moving in. They reminded me of the only ice box I can remember, in my spoon grandmother's kitchen. I remember sitting for a few minutes on the block of ice, which was covered with scratchy tan cloth, probably burlap.
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