I think about that old mirror often.
It was, at least, five feet long, and two feet high at it’s tallest point, which featured painstakingly carved intricate flowers and filigree. Two wooden slats divided the glass into three separate mirrors, and, long ago, someone had burnished the wooden frame golden.
I came upon it while helping my elderly next-door neighbor, Ruby, remove years of flea-market finds, incredible buys, and assorted debris from what was to have been a spare room. Ruby was everything her name implies. She was also a packrat.
As I pulled the awkwardly shaped mirror out from behind a crib mattress Ruby was sure she might need one day, I immediately noticed the craftsmanship. The detail, the inaccuracies, and the aged brown paper, stretched across the back of the frame, proclaimed “hand-crafted”.
Turning it to once again admire the carvings, I caught Ruby’s reflection in one of the panels. She stood behind me, and a little away; and, on her face, a look of adoration, usually reserved for my children.. Glancing at her, I asked the question without words, and she began to tell the story.
The mirror had been in her family as long as she could remember, which was a very long time. It had been the centerpiece of her grandmother’s dining room, and then, later, her mother’s “front room”. She wasn’t clear as to whose hands had done the carving, but she knew he had presented it to the family as a treasured heirloom, and they had treated it as such, for decades. Regret replaced delight as she explained it’s present home.
“I used to have a place to hang such things, but I don’t anymore.”
Coming closer, she raised one gnarled hand towards the apex of the frame and rested it upon the most elaborate of it’s decoration. After several seconds, she used the same hand to retrieve the ever-present tissue from the pocket of her shapeless sweater, and dabbed tobacco juice from one corner of her lined, colorless mouth.
“I want you to have it.”, she proclaimed, and turned back to the box she had been pillaging before my find.
I stared at her bent back for several seconds, before challenging her decision by suggesting she consider making a gift to one of her two daughters.
“Do you see either one of them here today?”, she barked as she rose creakily, turning slanted eyes in my direction. “Huh? Do ya?”
Several seconds passed in uncomfortable silence before she closed, quietly, with “Alright, then.”
I hung the mirror, that evening, over the sofa in my living room, and it was, once again, the centerpiece it was meant to be. It hung there for several years, until the size of my family exhausted the space inside the little house next door to Ruby, forcing us to leave our friend. But, her mirror made the trip. In total, I moved the mirror to three different homes. Ruby would see the mirror hung in all but the last, but, somehow, I’m sure she knew it was there.
During my most recent move, light packing, invoked by emergent situations, left the mirror hanging for the next occupants to admire. And, I hope they did. I hope the decades of love and care stroked into it’s wood demanded the respect it, and she deserved. And, Ruby, who was everything that name implies, understands.
Are We There Yet? 