Ebay Winner's High

Fourth post in 24 hours. Sorry to suffocate you guys but I HAD to post today. This is my birthday gift from my sister E. No, it's not my birthday...we've had enough birthdays around here.

I didn't even post on Hubby's birthday, which was between the two boys' birthdays...mostly because he forbid it. (I should have though, just to show off the Lemon Curd Cheesecake I made him.)

I have been searching for this particular punch bowl for about 14 years now. My grandmother

left me a set of wonderful punch cups when she passed away. The punch bowl had long since been broken, but I love all things old and they were lovely, so she left me the remains of the set. They are an odd square shape that I'd never seen before. For the last 14 years I have checked estate sales, antique shops and the like for something similar. No luck.

Thinking about her recently got me interested again, and this time with the internet at my disposal I was actually able to put a label on my treasures. They are Hazel Atlas Depression Glass, from the Williamsport Prism Cut Collection. According to what I've learned they were acquired from the Sears & Roebuck Catalog in the 30's, as most old wonderful things have been known to originate. Armed with an identity, it didn't take me long to track one down. Actually, I tracked down plenty of them...at not so pretty prices. Several days went by and I found a small obscure link to an ebay offering. This lady in New Jersey was selling "a large heavy glass bowl I found in my Nana's attic". She had no idea what she had. Sadly, I did not inform her. The bidding started at $0.99. I was the winning bidder at $3.25. It cost more to ship the doggone thing that to buy it!!

I know from looking that the original set also contained a smaller bowl that could be turned over and used as a stand for the bowl. According to what I can find, those are pretty much extinct, but I will keep on looking. I was so thrilled to finally find it! My sister E was visiting and insisted on paying for it as a birthday gift even though my birthday isn't until August...well the fact that I screwed up my paypal account might have spurred that decision, but I love her for it anyway :)

It arrived yesterday right as I was leaving for work and I couldn't wait to post some pics of it! I've placed the three cups I have unpacked with it to show what the set looks like together. I'm just so happy to have the set now. I have to go out in the garage to rescue the rest of the cups from the boxes and dust. I think I'll have to throw a party just so I can use them :)

Sad trips down memory lane and other relevant things.

www.historicalstockphotos.com

I remember learning that my grandmother had 3 dead children. The thought was horrible. I asked so many questions of my father, who was telling the story at time. He never met any of these siblings before they passed. They were all from earlier in his own mother’s life. One little girl, named Eva (pronouced with a short e, “eh-vah”) died of pneumonia at the age of two. Another little girl, named Dorothy, died at the age of three of dysenteric diarrhea in an age when diarrhea alone would kill you. My father swore till his dying day that the diarrhea was from eating an orange after the first frost….we weren’t allowed to even go near an orange tree in the winter. I’ve just now thought to myself that maybe I have mixed the girls up and Eva was three and Dorothy was two, and maybe what they died of respectively too, but either way those were their names and they each died of one of those causes.

My grandmother had another child die, but that child was never talked about. My mother told me once that the child was born dead. She said it was a boy and he was a mongloid. A water-head baby, she said. I didn’t know what that meant. Did the head look like a water balloon? Then she told me that my grandfather had delivered the baby next to the furnace and upon seeing the dead baby’s appearance he covered it and wouldn’t let my grandmother see him. Mom said that after my grandmother was done birthing the placenta and was resting he took the baby into the back yard and buried it. To this day, no one knows where that baby lies.

As a small child the story was gross at best, scary at worst. Now that I am a mother I cannot comprehend it. The fact alone that she lost not one but three children is devastating, but to add to it that she never laid eyes on one of them is ….too much. Later in my life I would walk around my grandmother’s back yard and think of that baby. Everyone has heard about how rough life was during the Depression, about how little people had, how hard work was to come by, but now I think about it from a woman’s perspective. Being a mother under those circumstances…my grandmother’s circumstances. Pregnant, with one or two small children under foot, in the rural Central Florida swamps (Florida was nothing but swamps before Walt Disney came along), living in a makeshift two room house that my railroad-working husband built with one saved-up-for board at a time with no midwife to deliver my child. Laboring for an unknown amount of time in the heat of that furnace while my husband did the best he could until the baby finally came, and then…silence, I’m sure. No cry, no wiggle. I wonder what my grandmother said, if she tried to reach out for him. I wonder what my grandfather did, what made him immediately decide to hide it, or what facial expression he had.

After being married for a little while myself, I know that husband and wife have a language all their own. Expressions, body language, exchanged looks. I do wonder if he had to say anything at all. As a woman, maybe she knew. Maybe she knew before the labor even started. Women are incredibly in tune to the movements of their babies, maybe he stopped moving at some point and she expected the outcome. Neither of my grandparents had better than a 3^rd or 4^th grade education, so I’m not real sure what exactly was wrong with the baby except that obviously it was dead and disfigured. Now it is buried in the back yard. My grandmother had a large flower garden and I often wondered if it was close to the grave in some tributary way. My aunt lives there now. The flower garden is gone. Time passes, stories are sometimes all that it left.