I love when one person's story encourages another person to tell a similar story, and my favorite types of stories are ones that inspire an entire room to tell similar stories. One case was a fictional story Frances wrote about hope chests or cedar chests: used to hold the clothes, linen and objects a future bride would take into her new home. Listed blow are several different stories about hope chests and the attics they were stored in. We hope you enjoy them:
Frances Bryce
09.10.2020
Attics and Hope Chests
You know sometimes I write what's going on and sometimes I use my imagination and if I can think of something I can relate to. I do some fiction. I try to mix it up. Even a little bit of poetry.
We didn't have an attic in my house, to tell the truth. We had no attic nor a basement in South Carolina. Not even a spring cellar. I guess its called a ranch style sort of place but no. We never had a basement in our house in California. There is an attic space, but not an attic.
I didn’t have a hope chest. My mother had a chest where she kept the silver and all that stuff that you only got out when you had company, and the special table cloths. Usually the young women, matter a fact a girl that was engaged to my brother, she had a hope chest. It was all the things she was saving for when she got married and all this kind of stuff. Although they didn't get married but that was what she had in her chest. A lot of people have hope chests before they get married. Young women at one time did that. I know in South Carolina they did that. They were engaged or hoped to be married, they put all of the stuff that they thought they would like to have in the hope chest, and they were hoping that they would get married.
Ann von Dehsen
09.10.2020
Attics and Hope Chests
Did anybody else remember, like in real life, going up into the attic their house. Because you made me remember, my sister and I used to kind of sneak up there and pull out boxes and find secrets of our parents. Like a hope chest? My mother had a hope chest they called them. You know like way back when people were engaged they saved certain things and it was a hope chest. I think more like linen, tablecloths. I mean my mother still had one when I was growing up and in there she kept a christening dress after you get married I guess then you begin to store some things. She had some of our baby clothes and things and then afterwards. And actually it was in this long hallway, my sister and my rooms were up in actually what used to be the attic and they changed it to rooms eventually and it was in this hallway that was very dark and I was about 5 or 6 when our rooms changed to go up there. And my sister used to tell me it was a coffin, so I thought that they were bodies in the chest. And then I told my mother and my mother was of course yelling at my sister. I was scared to death of that thing. It looks like a coffin actually.
Jewel Grace
09.10.2020
Attics and Hope Chests
My grandmother eloped to get away from her family. She was about 14 years old. Her husband was older. I never knew him. My mom had a box and she just called it a cedar chest because it was made of cedar and she put winter stuff in there and she put mothballs in there so moths wouldn't get in there. So it wasn't a hope chest it was just a cedar chest.
Eleanor Kazdan09.10.2020
Attics and Hope Chests
Well, I never had an attic, and it was a big disappointment because I'd read these stories about attics and no my family never had an attic. Nor have I ever had an attic. I mean not that kind, it was an attic with a fan in it but no storage. The other thing that sounded romantic to me were these big chests, like cedar chests where people would put their treasures in and that also caught my imagination although there again I never had one of those. But I loved the idea of opening the chest and going through it.
Norman Cain
09.10.2020
Attics and Hope Chests
I tell you what, I can't recall my mother having a hope chest but I remember how the females that were going to get married, they would have hope chests. I don't know if you talked about that or not but they would definitely have hope chests; because things were different then. The the lady met the fellow’s family and vice versa and you had to meet the whole families and you had to go through a real ritual.
The only hope chest that I knew about was like my best friend back when we were in college. He knew that he was going to marry his wife in their freshman year so she collected stuff for 4 years and they got married the year after they graduated. She had 5 years of stuff.
I also remember when we went down South and stayed with my grandparents on their farm during the summer, and of course my cousin Delores was 40 years older than me and she would have boyfriend—they eventually married—come over and they'd be out on the swing, but it was highly chaperoned: once a week and then you had enough time and you got up out of there.
And so those were the traditions of yesteryear, but it’s not that way anymore. Things are something else. You know those memories, I go back into the memories, you know? And that's where I'm at. Comparing to what's going on today. We have to move on but maybe a little bit of both. That's what I'm saying.
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And don't forget to maintain contact with the older buds in your life. If you can't be there in person, please call them, email them, or message them on social media. And if they're using teleconferencing or remote events for the first time, give them a call and help them set things up. Check in on them to see how well they're getting used to these programs. Buy them a computer or an internet package if they don't have one of their own. It's a human right, after all.
Curated by Caitlin Cieri