Anna Marie McCrary Nason – Gifts From the Past - One

 

Mama liked to collect things and I inherited a lot. I’m glad I did. Every piece has been a special part of my life as wife, mother, and grandmother. The two pottery jars were in her kitchen on Jefferson Hwy. She and Daddy moved there after they sold the white house on Eugene Street in 1970, a month or so after I married. There are no markings on the Kitchen String jar. It was new when Mama bought it. The crock pot jar is real and old. It has the number 150 hand printed on the bottom. It could mean it was the potters 150^th jar or could be 1.50 cost.

It was a beautiful apartment with a large living room with sliding doors out to a brick patio surrounded by a brick privacy wall on three sides. A galley kitchen and small dining room were next to the living room. There was a large opening at the dining room and a smaller opeing at the other of the kitchen which led down the hallway to the two bedrooms and two bathrooms. A little table, a wooden rocking chair that belonged to Daddy's grandmother, and a stool stood at the end of the kitchen. Above them was a wooden shelf that Mama had decoratd in the farmhouse style of today. She was always ahead of herself in designs. Her niece, my cousin, Amy Weiner Barham has that shelf and some of the other things that were on it in her kitchen now. 

The telephone was on the wall just inside the door of the kitchen at the hallway side. She would sit in the kitchen and drink her coffee and talk on the phone or sit there when daddy was cooking his famous rump roast recipe or make a batch of fudge.

I can remember seeing the shelf and assorted things in all the other houses she and Daddy lived in until they actually moved back into the same apartment in late 1980’s, where she died in 1991.

My parents were going to elope. They started dating at LSU when my father returned from WWII and picked back up with his Sigma Chi fraternity brothers. His best friend, Buddy Mundinger, a Kappa Alpha, was dating Joyce Quinn who was Mama’s best friend. They put the two together and it was love at first sight, at least for my father. Mama was deeply in love with her high school sweetheart, but she broke his heart when Daddy started pursuing her. Her parents never liked her boyfriend and were thrilled that Daddy came into the picture. I do believe they were in loved when they married.

The day they were to elope to the courthouse, enough family found out and a wedding at St. James Episcopal Church was set. This was the Nason family home church and Fr. Phillip P. Werlein married them. (He also Christened me in 1950.)

They didn’t have any money to speak of. It was December 12, 1948. But Mama wanted to collect a set of fine china and so picked out one. Unfortunately, they only got one dinner plate, Castleton China, made in the USA, “Devon.” The first time I saw this plate it was in the kitchen cabinet of the butler’s pantry at the white house on Eugene Street. I was about 11 years old. After Mama died, I picked it out of her things to keep and it has always had a home in my china cabinets. Today, it sits on a wooden shelf in my kitchen which ties in perfectly with the blue theme we have going in there. I sometimes wish I had tried to collect more to have at least four place settings. But that might be too late. Maybe whomever ends up with the plate will try to complete the setting.

9/4/21