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jyyanks_gw

Grandma's curio

jyyanks
17 years ago

Hi,

This is my first post on this forum as I am usually over at furniture or home decorating. My Dh's grandmother sold her house and went into a nursing home. The closing is in 2 weeks and we still need to get rid of some of the bigger items left in the house.

She had a curio in her LR that looks like it could be worth something but we're not experts by any means. Can anyone help?

My FIL just wants to give it away but my MIL thinks that we may be better off trying to sell it on ebay. We've tried craigslist but there is no market for this type of furniture here. Can any of you knowlegeable people help? Thanks in advance.

Comments (14)

  • lindac
    17 years ago
    last modified: 9 years ago

    It's lovely!!...Not too valuable...but certainly worth 2 to 4 hundred....
    I am not seeing a close up, it may well be worth more.
    It's a very attractive and desirable piece.
    Don't know where you live, but a consignment shop may be the way to go.
    Linda C

  • jyyanks
    Original Author
    17 years ago
    last modified: 9 years ago

    Thanks Lindac. It has been in the family for years and it seems like such a waste to give it away. Unfortunately, it does not match my decor and my MIL has no room for it. I didn't think of a consignment shop-thanks for the suggestion.

  • zeffyrose
    17 years ago
    last modified: 9 years ago

    That is such a lovely piece-----I would keep it if I were you even if it doesn't match your decor it is just too lovely to let it go to a stranger.

    JMHO----florence

  • lindac
    17 years ago
    last modified: 9 years ago

    I agree....your "decor" may change as your tastes mature....and you can never get back a family piece that has been sold.
    Linda C

  • patty_cakes
    17 years ago
    last modified: 9 years ago

    If you are under the age of 30 please keep Grandma' curio. I can tell you from experience giving away some of my Mother's beautiful when I was younger has come back to haunt me. So many times I have asked myself *why* I thought new was better.

    It may not appeal to you now, but as you grow older you will ne happy to have family treasures, especially those with a story behind them. ;o)

    patty_cakes

  • morgan88
    17 years ago
    last modified: 9 years ago

    i'll second all of the above. i keep EVERYTHING!!!! old chairs, prints, primers, linens, china, trunks, umbrella stands, etc. i may not like my two ornate victorian chairs, but they have been in my family since, well since the victorian era. my children or nephews may want them later or they might grow on me so they stay.

  • lindac
    17 years ago
    last modified: 9 years ago

    And I setill remember well some things that were my grandmother's that my mother got rid of when I was about 12...
    "What do you want that old stuff for?"...But I sure wish I had some of it now.
    Linda C

  • magnaverde
    17 years ago
    last modified: 9 years ago

    Hi Jyyyanks.

    Here's one other option which may or may not work for you. It worked for my family. When my grandmother went to a nursing home for what we hoped would only be a few months' recuperation, we noticed that some of the other residents had brought along a familiar chair or something from home, so later, when we all knew she couldn't go back home again, we took home to her: a carved oak piece similar to yours, holding her collection of china shoes, souvenirs of vacations in Europe, Canada & the St. Louis World's Fair of 1904, pictures of our family in old frames, a rotating assortment of silk flowers that recreated the look & mixture of the flowers she picked in her own garden, & the oil paintings that had hung in her bedroom for years.

    On the dresser across from the bed, we put a neon-green resin candy dish that was pretty close in pattern & a perfect color match for the antique vaseline glass candy dish that had been sitting for years on the coffee table at home, and on my regular visits to see her, I kept it filled with seasonal candy to ensure daily drop-in visits from the nurses & aides & visitors. I even had some of her favorite clothes (well, the top half, anyway: the jacket of a pink tweed Chanel suit, where hard black buttons got replaced with black yarn pompoms; A Filson fishing jacket in red-&-black buffalo plaid; a bristol blue cashmere cardigan) recreated in washable polyfleece that needed no special care in the laundry.

    She knew perfectly well where she was, but to visitors she behaved as if she were receiving them at home, and refused any talk of symptoms. If you asked her "How are you?" she would give an answer based on the weather ("I'm so glad we' re getting rain. I worry about the sycamores in dry years" or the president's speech the night before ("I'm hopping mad!") or the Illinois-Michigan game ("I'm hopping mad!") or the view of the sun setting over Lake Vermilion ("If I were home yet, we could have a martini about now!") The only time she ever seemed sad was this time of year, when the smell of wood smoke from family picnics the in the public park across the way would make her think of home. "This place is all right, but what I really miss is a nice fire in the fireplace. Maybe next fall, I'll be strong enough to go home & I can build my own fire again."

    That was her approach to being laid up in bed: it was a temporary inconvenience, like the flu, or aphids on the roses. Every single visit, for three or four years after her stroke, she assured me she was feeling better, and that just as soon as she was also feeling a just little bit stronger, she would be able to back home & take care of her garden (where she just knew the yard man was getting lazy & leaving the tulip bulbs in the ground all summer so there'd be no blooms the next spring) and hope that the sofa wouldn't need reupholstered again from the silly cleaning girl's leaving the south window's blinds open so the fabric would fade.

    Of course, after a year and a half in the nursing home, there was no longer any home to go home to. There was no need for one anymore. Other people were living in her old apartment & all of her things except the curio cabinet, a lamp & the art on the walls of her room were dispersed to the houses of me & my brothers, the local historical society & a series of antique shops all over town, but we never told her that. There would be no point. She couldn't have gone go back home, anyway--even if home were still there--but I figured if the idea of going home one of these days kept her spirits up and gave her something to look forward to, then we would just work with that, instead of acknowledging the sad truth, that there was only one way she'd ever get to leave this place.

    So we pretended along with her that she would be able to go home again, giving her updates on her peonies, and the naughty squirrel that was always raiding the bird feeder, & promising not to drink the last Pepsi in the refrigerator so the cleaning girl would have something cold for her lunch. Mianly, we all agreed it would be great when she could go back herself and we could all gather around her big dining room table again, eating the half-burned toast she served on the pig-shaped cutting boards my grandfather had made fifty years before. I never let her know that when I left the nursing home on Saturday night, that I had to stay in a motel, and I let her believe I slept snug under a pile of the Hudson's Bay blankets she & my grandfather had bought when my mom was still in grade school. "Was the house warm enough, dear?" She would ask me this time of year. "If it's not, you can build a fire, becaue the radiators won't be on till November. Just don't forget to open the damper like your brother did that time." And I would always assure her wouldn't light a fire (which I couldn't, anyway)because I liked it cool at night--which I do, having acquired a taste for sleeping outdoors--clear up till December--on the big screened porch at their lake house when I was little. Meanwhile, all her old friends were sworn to secrecy, and they kept their promise to me.

    At my grandmother's visitation, there was a slew of people I didn't know. All her old friends from her old sorority, her bridge club, the Garden Club & church were there--some of whom I hadn't seen in years, though I often spotted their names in the visitor's book in the lobby at the nursing home--but there were a bunch of younger people too, much younger, ones I had never met before.

    One vaguely-familiar-looking young woman stopped by to express her sympathy. She explained that I didn't know her, but that she knew me from the pictures in my grandmother's room. I figured she was an aide from th nursing home, but no. She told me that she went to my grandmother's church & that her familty had moved into my grandmother's apartment after it became available a few years before.

    She also wanted to say that every few weeks she & her boys would stop by the nursing home, with a birthday bouquet of peonies from my grandmother's old garden, or some cut-paper snowflakes the kids had made for her window, or an ornament for her tree at Christmas or a new picture of their family. Then I realized why her face looked familiar. I had just seen it that afternoon, at the center of a group photo of a family in front of a big bay window.

    A few years before, I had noticed an earlier version of the same photo & asked my grandmother who the cute kids were, without even realizing that the window seat they were sitting in was the same one whre my brothers & I had sat to have our own pictures taken. Grandmother had just told me "They're friends from church. They're the cutest boys & they remind me a lot of you boys when you were little. Someday, maybe you'll get to meet them."

    Now, here they were, dressed up in their best Sunday school clothes, politely telling me they would miss my grandmother, that she was nice, that she gave them candy when they took her flowers, that she told them not to be afraid of the snakes--garter snakes--that lived in the garden because they were good snakes who ate bugs & only bit boys who hurt them. My brother knew all about the snake that lived underneath the daylilies. Or at least he knew about the biting part. The woman told me that on one visit my grandmother told the boys to look & see if they could find the lady's face in the marble around the fireplace and that the next day, the oldest boy had made her drive them all back down to the nursing home so he could tell my grandmother they found it. Of course I knew the face well, because she had shown it to me when I was little.

    So all this time, while my brothers & I were pretending that nothing had changed so that my grandmother wouldn't feel sad about losing her apartment, and while she had been pretending to believe our stories about the squirrel & the peonies us so that wewouldn't feel bad (about letting the apartment go), and all of us happy in the success of our little play-acting, she had gone right on & made a bunch of actual new friends out of people who had merely come to pay their polite respects, people who never knew the vaseline glass candy dish (only its plastic understudy), people who never got to eat toast off the pig-shaped breadboard, but people who had, nevertheless, grown to care about an old lady they never saw anywhere but sitting up in bed, and who couldn't do anything but laugh & tell funny stories about other little boys she knew & complain about Congress & share candy corn or Hershey's Kisses from a green plastic dish.

    The actual service hadn't yet started, so I went out to the car & brought the green candy dish inside & held it out--still half-full of the candy I had bought a few weeks before--to the oldest boy. His eyes lit up & he lifted off the top & they all grabbed a piece. Their eyes lit up. The mom laughed & said she collected antiques, so she was always admiring my grandmother's china cabinet & the stuff in it, but the boys were enthralled with the green candy dish & while mom was chatting would hold the lid up to the window and stare at the all-green view outside. Just, of course, like I had done with the original dish, fifty year before.

    Anyway, I told her I wasn't offering them candy, I was giving them the dish, and because their mother was nice enough to visit my grandmother--and more importantly, take a bunch of cute, funny kids along with her when she did, and because the curio cabinet was too fussy for my tastes, and because my brothers had no room for it, I gave it (and most of the stuff in it) to her. The last time I got a card from her--it's been a few years now--it included that year's holiday picture of her & the boys, sitting in front of the china cabinet, which was now back in the same spot it had been when it belonged to my grandmother. Anyway, one way or another, things eventually find the way to where they belong.

    These days, I have the vaseline glass candy at my house. There's no longer any candy in it, just a snapshot of three cute boys in red sweaters, sitting in my grandmother's old living room.
    M.

  • markmizzou
    17 years ago
    last modified: 9 years ago

    All I can say -- FANTASTIC STORY- !

  • lindac
    17 years ago
    last modified: 9 years ago

    Brought just a few tears.....
    Thank you........
    Linda C

  • Claire Buoyant
    17 years ago
    last modified: 9 years ago

    Mag, I LOVED your story, especially that it was a true story.

  • moonshadow
    17 years ago
    last modified: 9 years ago

    Tears for me, too. What a blessing for your grandmother to have such loving grandsons. And an even greater blessing to have had a grandmother like yours. You are rich, indeed.

  • earthlydelights
    17 years ago
    last modified: 9 years ago

    what a beautiful story, what a beautiful glimpse of your heart.

    thanks, teary-eyed and all,
    maryanne

  • zeffyrose
    17 years ago
    last modified: 9 years ago

    What a beautiful story---I am touched beyond measure.

    How lucky you and you family and the new family are to have such a beautiful connection.

    I'm also teary -eyed.

    Florence