Yesterday I was going through a box of rickrack that people have given me over the years thinking I might use it somewhere on my Owl Woman when I saw the deep orange/yellow. Drawn to the color, I pulled it out and really saw it for the first time.
It was different from the others I had which were wrapped in plastic and clearly not as old. When I turned it over there was a price tag on the back. It cost 8 cents.
At first I thought it might be from the 1950’s but when I saw the price tag, it seemed to me it had to be older. I mean the last time I bought something for two cents, it was a single piece of candy in the early 1970s.
So I looked online and up popped a newspaper ad for JC Penny with sewing notions that cost 8 cents each. It was from 1930.
My mother was born in 1929. When I look at the RickRack I picture my mother, who will be 92 this year, as a baby in a tenement somewhere in The Bronx. I try to imagine my grandmother holding her, but I can only see her as an older woman, the grandmother I knew.
The label is faded and torn, but the RickRack itself is still an intensely rich color.
A part of me doesn’t want to use it, wants to keep it just as it is. But I know I will use it if it’s what I need for a piece of my art. It would seem almost magical to me to think that this Rick Rack survived for 91 years to be used by me.
I don’t believe in fate, but this does make me wonder.
Your recent essay about the “next nest” and then this one today, have been lovely to read; very comforting in a way. Completely different topics but so prosaic. Your theme on the rick rack is like a thread connecting us through time. Magical indeed.
That’s lovely Barbara. I wish I had thought to use your words, “a thread connecting us through time”. 🙂
When I’ve found stuff that old it made me feel kinda like a “time traveler”.
Especially cool when it belonged to someone I knew.
Great stuff.
That’s the perfect way of putting it Keith!
Something like that, intact, might be worth a bit of money to collectors on eBay.
It might Bryn, but I never feel right selling something that was given to me. Also, it’s not something I want to be doing.
Oh , the story or stories I wish it could tell of its journey! I’d have a hard time using it too, but think eventually I could.