Naomi Smith

“Two moves equal a fire.”   Someone said that or something like it and I think it might be true.  We’ve moved numerous times and things disappear, are given away, or get lost in the shuffle of packing and moving vans.  Beloved keepsakes among them.

But this last move was a doozy. Take the contents of various households over the past eighty some years, what has made the cut in previous moves and must now fit into a two bedroom apartment in an “independent living” facility and you’ll find yourself facing impossible

choices.

Interestingly, the two pieces pictured above sit on the bookshelf  of our present apartment,  saved though they stir no personal memories and are not ‘beloved’ as are the cherished reminders of children or special trips we’ve taken.  I’ve never met the man who appears on the postcard that accompanies the artifacts.  The old man, hunkered down, caressing a prehistoric grinding stone, is the father of my eldest sister’s husband. 

A poet and historian, Johannes Boolsen found the artifacts shown above, an arrowhead and a

flensing tool. 

All three of these people, Johannes, my brother-in-law and my sister are dead; we have these beautiful stone tools only because our brother-in-law gave them to my husband many years ago.  I can’t read the Danish that tells about the arrowhead but Gudmund’s’s scrawl says it was in use in the “older bronze age.”

The larger implement, the flensing tool from the Stone Age, is my favorite. I hold it in my hand and it fits perfectly.  No one showed me how to hold it, I just knew.  It fits as though made for my hand.  I think of the man or woman who held it those millennia ago, scraping the inside of a deer’s skin, an otter’s, a bear’s, until the skin was soft and supple.  I feel a real sense of companionship with her or him.

I will hold in trust both artifacts that sit on our bookshelf for whomever comes after us and hope they in turn will hold them in trust for the generations that follow.