Wednesday, April 18, 2012

The Hope Chest

I was an inquisitive kid...and not much has changed.  In the file cabinet of my brain, the question, "Why?" probably has the largest folder...except that comparing my brain to something so organized as a filing cabinet, is probably a little bit inaccurate.  No, my brain is more like... a hope chest...if you don't know what a hope chest is, please allow me to explain. The definition of a hope chest is: a chest used to collect items such as clothing and household linen, by unmarried young women in anticipation of married life but this isn't really what I grew up knowing a hope chest to be.  

My Mom has a hope chest that, I think, has been in the family for quite a long time.  When I was little, I used to LOVE to explore the hope chest.  I can still remember the nursing-home-y smell that wafted toward my nose as I lifted the top.  There were lots of keepsakes in the hope chest, but mainly it was filled with very RANDOM things. My favorite was my Mom's very old nun doll...anyone who knows my Mom probably smiles just thinking of her having a nun doll....it just makes so much sense.  There are very few people that I can think of who, in my opinion, would make great nuns, and my Mom is one of them....I, on the other hand- as a nun, would have been much more like Julie Andrew's character, Maria, in The Sound of Music (my very favorite movie growing up) The song, How do you solve a problem like Maria, from the movie comes to mind when I think of myself as a "sister" :-)  My Mom and I are pretty much opposites....Perfect example: My mother had a nun doll, I had a New Kids on the block doll with a rat tail...here's Jordan!!!! He's "got the right stuff"

This is the best picture I could find of him, and unfortunately it doesn't showcase his rat tail as much as I'd like, but I must admit that his one gold hoop earring makes my heart flutter a little ;-)



Here is the hope chest, and when I opened it to look for the nun doll, that old smell made me smile. 


So when the inspiration came to write this blog, I searched all over the house for the nun doll so I could share her with you all, but she was nowhere to be found. When I looked in the hope chest, this is all I could salvage of her:


I told my Mom that I didn't remember her ever having arms...but then again, the dolls from my Mother's childhood that she let me play with tended to have a few limbs missing, or a ratty mess of hair from my "washing and styling" it....or sometimes I did their face make-up...well, with permanent markers, but my intentions were good.  This is probably the most bare arm of a nun I've ever seen! hehe - is that wrong?

OK well I am going to call it a night...
Disclaimer: No real Nun's were harmed in the making of this blog, and in no way am I suggesting that the rat tail should come back in style...

3 comments:

  1. Wait a minute!That BARE arm would definitely have been hidden behind a scapular of some sort.....No...I don't think that arm is from Sister Hope (as in chest...haha) maybe it's from Jordan's girl friend that you didn't know about....maybe it's from one of the facepainted dollies that went to your beauty parlor!? and sadly, it's a right arm....whoever that dolly was....she's not functioning that great w/o it!

    On a lighter note....( do or re or me....yeah....me)OF COURSE.....Sound of Music was MY favorite movie too....I saw it ....lived it a million times....ah the excitement of being sixteen going on seventeen! But the BEST was the scene in the gazebo (my heart could hardly stand the ROMANCE)"For here you are...standing there loving me...whether or not your should" BE STILL MY HEART!
    ...funny....Christopher Plummer looks soooo different to me now...but that's an entirely different blog!!! ANYWAY...when we moved to Virginia....first married....I walked to the end of the street we lived on that led to a dirt road....I was just exploring my new environs...and there, down that dirt road, there they were... my own soundofmusic mountains.....the Blue Ridge mts....right down the street!!!! I knelt in the meadow right there and cried....I was soooo grateful....the Lord had taken me from Dallas....where there were no meadows....no trees...to this little piece of heaven....I truly felt like I had died and turned into MARIA....

    GOD IS GOOD!

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  2. Oh Jules! I remember that hope chest! It smelled like a mixture of old people, moth balls, and Nabisco nilla wafers. It was also good to see a picture of Jordan too. Hopefully you can find him somewhere. I am sure he is packed away in a container with Barbie Dolls, He-Man action figures, and muscles (all missing limbs).
    Or he could also be in the Christmas Nativity Scene box in which He-Man would sometimes appear and whoop up on the wise men.
    Love,
    Jeff

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  3. My mama had a cedar chest, too. Fond memories.

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