If a major catastrophe were to completely devastate our country's infrastructure and we were made to live in another country. If I was able to take three things with me that would represent my culture and that meant a lot to me I would take a quilt, a book of recipes and a book pictures.
The first item is a quilt that was given to me by mother 2o years ago on my wedding day. It has been handed down to the first daughter on her wedding day since 1848. When I was younger my mother would bring the quilt out once every few years to tell us stories about her grandmother and Daisey and her mother Ada Amelia. The last time I pulled the quilt out was when 2014, when I took my daughter to see my great-grandmother in the nursing home. That day we took one of the last pictures with her. In the photo it was my great-grandmother, my grandmother, my mother, myself and my daughter--five generations of women in one photo.
The second item I would take, would be a small wooden box filled with my grandmother's recipes. The recipes range from southern classics such as smother pork chops to Ghanaian dishes like Red Red and Shoko. Although I have committed most of the recipes to memory they were a Christmas gift from her and they are all written by her hand. My husband I and I had just gotten married and he had taken a job in another state and we could not make the trip home for Thanksgiving and I wanted to cook my first Thanksgiving dinner. Having grown up in the kitchen watching my mother, grandmother and aunts cook one might have thought that I would be capable of this task. Yet, I was not! I called home everyday for a week to get my grandmother to walk me through step-by-step of preparing my first Thanksgiving meal. Believe me my phone bill was higher than my grocery bill because there was no free long distance back then. The next two weeks are so I received and early Christmas gift...a box of hand written recipe cards from my grandmother. Over the years she would mail me more recipes as she wrote them.
The last thing I would take would be a photo album, with family photos. The photo albums has pictures of family members that have passed, including my twin sisters. My father was military and we were able to travel with him, he was also an avid photographer. He would take candid photos of us all the time. My favorite ones are the black and white photos. My sisters passed away in 2001 and 2010, respectively, and those photos are the something I hold dear to me.
If I arrived at my destination and was told that I could only keep one of the three items, I would be heart broken. Thinking about this blog post has made me realize that most of the things that I hold in the highest regard may not have any monetary value but they mean everything to me and my family.