There is a lovely blue Wedgewood porcelain lamp that has sat on my mother's dresser for as long as I remember. I've always fancied its simple urn-like lines, and and it's pure white shade. There's a crack or two I've noticed ... it has obviously been repaired but I never really knew what all that was about.
Today my mother and I were taking a walk where she live
s. We passed some windows with messed up venetian blinds and I told her how I hate to see messy blinds in windows. Just a personal preference--neat rather than messy. Back at her little apartment, we sat on the sofa to talk.
"Speaking of venetian blinds," she began, "when we moved into our little parsonage as (almost) newlyweds, the church had fixed it up for us and had hung new venetian blinds at the windows. But they didn't know how to hang them. I discover
ed that fact the day I first went to clean the living room. I pulled up the blinds and they came crashing down, taking my beautiful wedgewood lamp with them. It broke into many pieces. How I loved that lamp––a wedding
present from my aunt and uncle. When your father came home for lunch he found me on the living room floor dissolved in tears."
My father, loving groom that he was (all his life) took the pieces and somehow glued the
m back into a beautiful lamp that still hangs together 65 years later. You'd
never know how broken it had been. Nor can I visualize my mother on the floor crying!
I love the stories that come at the oddest comments. Now I'll examine the lamp more closely, and from now on when I look I'll think of my dad's loving hands gluing broken pieces together for his young bride. I have two more stories about broken Wedgewood, but this one is the dearest by far! (Top photo is of a favorite lamp of mine, as yet unbroken).
What a treasure you have. Your mother, that is. It's neat that she told you the story behind the broken places.
ReplyDeleteI know that you value the lamp as wellknowing that it's been with your mom all those years.