Now y'all done gone and made me all pensive. I think about stuff like that quite a bit when walking through antique stores. I see paintings of people and I wonder who they are and why their family decided to let these old portraits go. Did nobody care enough to keep them? Or were the pictures so old the family couldn't even remember who the people in the portraits were. My dad always said, "Son, it only takes one generation to lose knowledge. If your generation doesn't pass on to your children what mine has passed on to you, it is lost forever." My dad was a Southern Baptist preacher and was talking about faith and Christianity in general, but I think about that statement when I see those old portraits. Did one generation fail to tell the next who that was in the picture? Did they forget to tell their children about that person, sharing memories so those children felt a connection to the person in the picture? I feel like that is the case. With no knowledge or connection to the person in the picture, the painting gets thrown on the trash pile.
The same goes for our cast iron or anything else we have. If our kids don't place emotional value on them, they are gone when we pass. As they say, you can't take it with you. If it's something you want to keep in the family, make sure you let folks know what it is, and why it's important. Make a list and put it in your will. Don't leave it up to the family, in their time of grief, to fight over what to do with the stuff.
Sorry for the long post. But what can I say? I'm a sentimentalist.
