Patina

My eighty-nine-year-old mother is undertaking her own version of Swedish death cleaning, even though she’s been an inveterate thrower‑out of things as long as I can remember. There’s really not that much to get rid of. But she’s at it again, rummaging through drawers and fretting over the items that have accumulated in her not very crowded condo storage locker in southern Ontario. Her recent excavations unearthed a couple of drawings made by four-year-old me, a 1953 silver dollar that was a gift from her father to newly born me, and a handwritten document from her maternal grandmother to “all concerned in the Family.” It’s an odd contract of sorts, written in a kind of legalese that my great-grandmother must have picked up from somewhere. It reads as follows:

This letter to all concerned in the Family of the late John Gerrard Neale late of 402 St. Antoine St, Lachine, Que. All the Brass now in use, namely brass Trays...