My object of history is a small, ceramic jar that stands on three legs. The most stylized part of the container is the lid. Sitting on top of the lid is a detailed sculpture of two white doves touching pink beaks together. On either side of them are white roses with fading green leaves.
The object that I describe before me is none other than a trinket from my mother’s home country. For the first seven years of her life, my mother lived on the island nation of Trinidad and Tobago. She would immigrate to the United States in 1973 with her sister. They would follow after my grandma who had gone five years before them. There would be an important family member left behind however. My mother’s grandmother, Maude Peterson, lived quite a ways from her grandchildren. While my mother grew up in Port of Spain, Trinidad, her grandmother lived on the neighboring island of Tobago. A trip to grandma’s house meant a three hour-long commute by ferry. However, that trip was made many times. One of the last trips though was when my mother and her younger sister went to live with their grandmother after their own mother immigrated.
During her stay there, my mother became acquainted with the curio cabinet that her grandmother owned. It contained small possessions and trinkets with the ceramic jar being one of them. That particular item had an effect on my mother, as she would end up keeping it upon leaving the country. At the age of seven, my mother would leave Trinidad and Tobago along with her sister. They anticipated seeing their mother and the new life that she had built upon immigration. However, the small jar would come along as a memento of the old life that they had, storing their memories of their grandmother.
In time, the jar came to contain newer memories. Over twenty years after my mother left Trinidad, I was born in 1996. Shortly after, the United States began circulating commemorative quarters with varying reverse sides in 1999. These reverse sides featured unique images, one for each American state and territory. A friend of my mother would give her these new coins for collection purposes. My mother had already collected many unique coins at this point. They were collected through out her life here and there. Along with the new quarters, the coins would all go in her jar.
I remember from my childhood once being shown the different coins in the jar. However, looking at it now I see that I had long forgotten the sheer variety of coinage. Taking a few of the coins out of the jar leave me with the following: 1 franc and 20 cents from Switzerland, 1 dollar and 25 cents from Jamaica, 2 pence from the UK, and 1 florin from Aruba.
More than being an interesting hobby, these coins and the jar that holds them represent a different age to me. The jar used to belong in my great-grandmother’s curio cabinet and has since been filled with coins from different points of the late 1900s. Now its come to rest in my own mother’s cabinet, so I’ll always be connected to that older generation in that way. My mother always said that the jar reminds her of her grandmother when she sees it. While I can’t have any such memories of that person, I can appreciate them better through the jar and the significance it has for my mother.
