This is for Tuesday February 16, Magpie Tales

Without further ado, I give you my 2-16 Magpie Tale.....let me know, I know you will how this hit you or not....maybe next week it will be briefer, the  photo from Willow and the challenge got the best of me.... the challenge was to simply write something about the photo....and how the object came to your possession...

So there it sets one last trinket to pack, the old Pewter mug. Oh who knows what it really is, mug, ice bucket, jar, tankard. Besides that who knows if it’s even pewter. She’d never done the research she’d meant to do about it, but what did it matter now? Maybe later she would get to that after all; now she had nothing but time. The past year had been all consuming.



Diane picked up the old pewter mug, rubbing its sides, as she sighed and smiled. Lord knows she’s had little to smile about over the past year…Walt’s diagnosis, chemo, surgeries, radiation, hospice, the bitter ending, the funeral, but she smiled. This mug was the sole possession she had from her Granpa. Lots of memories, but no stuff. Ahh who needs stuff anyway? What’s it matter now?


Her family had little to leave as inheritance; that’s what she’d thought. “I never thought I would inherit anything and so I should not be disappointed.” When Mom died, her brother and his wife had scoured her home. Diane was lucky to get this old mug. Something no one else wanted. By the time she’d arrived home for the funeral there was nothing left but dust and dirt, her school photos and this old mug. They said they had left it for her. Big of them. That was the last time she had seen them, 15 years ago. Why even think about them now? When the estate attorney’s settlement letter arrived, months later, she was astonished at the rest of the story. Her brother had diverted $200,000 cash from Mom’s accounts to his own name. Under the estate laws he had pulled a fast one. Money she never knew Mom had. Ahh, water under the bridge. It happens in all families, she just never would have believed it would happen to her. Walt had urged her to “call the s.o.b and ask him for your half of the money as your mom had in her will,” Diane never did that. “NO I will not give him the satisfaction of knowing how deeply he hurt me.,” was all she would say about it. Now after years it mattered not at all, money only money.


Diane hugged the old pewter mug and remembered Granpap’s tales that it had belonged to an old man who used if for his last ante in a poker game. The old man had been a successful gold miner, but had squandered his wealth on drink and worse habits. Granpap won the mug playing cards in the back of the butcher shop. The old man had nothing left but the pewter mug but the guys had compassion and let him play out his hand. Granpap won that game and collected his winnings. He pushed the mug back across the table to the old man who would not take it, saying, “No you won it fair and square, you keep it.” They heard he had died later that week, drunk in the gutter, with no family or friends to grieve after him. Diane had heard the story so many times despite the protest of her grandma, who never could stand the sight of the pewter mug. To grandma it represented Granpap’s poker playing for which she had little use and further more she did not believe the old man could have ever been wealthy! “How could someone lose all they had?” Ahh grandma, if you were here today you’d likely ask that again, “how can someone lose all they had?”


But Granpap kept the pewter mug right beside his chair to hold his pipe and tobacco pouch. Granpap always said everyone needs someone to remember about them after they are gone from this valley of tears, so he would do that for the old man by keeping his mug. After both granpap and grandma died, her Mom put the mug in the basement to hold a scouring pad and Fels Naphtha soap alongside the stationary tub. Diane remembered asking her mother if she could take it with her when she left for college, to hold her pencils, pens, scissors. Mom would not allow that, saying, “Not that dirty old thing, you will disgrace yourself.”


Really all Diane wanted was something physical from her grandparents to hold onto. The pewter mug would be something that would always remind her of them and of the old man she never knew. But she had often imagined stories about that old man, how he regained his money and positions of prominence once more. She always liked a happy ending but she had gotten to know life was sparse on happy endings. Yet, even if that ex-brother, that’s how she thought of him, left the mug for her as an insult, he would never know that he had given her a treasure.


The mug became the holder of Diane and Walt’s bucket list, something else that doesn’t matter anymore. Diane looked over the packed and sealed moving boxes pondering where to put this pewter relic. Tomorrow the foreclosure agents would arrive to seize this house for the bank. This house that was supposed to be their down sized retirement home. Ahh, the plans they had, to down size and travel at whim. She recalled a sign she’d seen somewhere, “We plan and God laughs!” Laughs, well he’d pulled a good one on them. If this was God’s idea of a joke, well then she simply did not get it. God is not cruel. Diane believed in the loving presence that had guided her most of her life. Somehow somewhere there has to be good. Diane let the tears seep over her cheeks as she thought of Walt as she recalled that line from “The Help”,”Sooner or later we just have to run out of awful!”


Diane unfolded the bucket list that they had so carefully crafted from the pewter mug. She read over their plans, plans that must have tickled the Lord who took Walt from her too soon. Plans-- first class air plane rides to England; a cruise on the Mediterranean; three months in their RV to Alaska; time in a first class five star hotel in Charleston; ride a horse around the Kentucky derby track; fly a single engine plane over the ocean to the Bahamas. ….more…as her tears flowed. Diane quickly sighed and with that breath got an urge to burn the Bucket list, it’s useless, a fantasy. Why not, a closing ritual for what would be her last night in their almost retirement home. Burn it in the pewter mug; fitting. Granpap would laugh that the mug would again have ashes.


Diane found some matches and stepped over to the kitchen sink. Diane struck the match, lighting the list afire….ouch, ow, oh damn! She’d singed her fingers, as she swore out loud and dropped the list and the mug, she stomped on the embers of the list that had fallen to the floor, and she looked at the pewter mug that had bounced with a vengeance on the ceramic tile floor! What, oh no, the mug broke from its base! Looks like we are not quite yet running out of awful---as Diane knelt to the floor, she could not believe her eyes…..the bottom of the mug had broken, it had been so solid, so heavy,. She’d never thought it could come apart….but there it was in two pieces. Scattered near it? What is that? Can it be, many gold nuggets…….her tears mingled with amazed laughter, can it be real? Maybe we are out of awful after all! Maybe the old man was a miner.


I became Diane’s hospice care attendant in the last months of her life. She’d shared the tale of the Pewter mug with me. The gold nuggets were her financial windfall, her inheritance. She asked if I would like to have the old pewter mug, which I accepted gratefully, assuring her that I would always remember her, her granpap and the old miner when I looked at it.

 
Thanks to Willow for dreaming up this challenge....and I do love her  Magpie Stamp which she has so graciously shared here for the readers....stay tuned for Next week!  It has been a long time since I have even thought about a magpie!