My home is filled with old objects. The rickety three-legged desk at which I am sitting this very moment. Across the room is a bookshelf bowing with the weight of books from my childhood. In the corner, a cedar chest that once belonged to my grandmother and that now holds photos, forgotten trinkets, the Alaskan snow globe given to me by my father when I was fifteen. I never even removed that globe from its bubble wrap. I haven’t looked at it in so many years I am surprised that I think of it now.
“I have always been drawn to the stories behind the things we keep. My grandmother was an excellent storyteller and my parents were storytellers too. I could sit and listen to them forever. At some point, I started developing the need to write.”
I have always been drawn to the stories behind the things we keep,” says Amber Lanier Nagle, a writer from Adairsville, Ga. From very early in her life, Amber understood the importance of preservation through oral history. “My grandmother was an excellent storyteller and my parents were storytellers too. I could sit and listen to them forever. At some point, I started developing the need to write.”
The first story Amber wrote was about her grandmother’s old sewing machine. “It was a gift on her wedding day. It was one of those old foot-pumping ones,” she tells me. After her grandmother’s death, the sewing machine spent years sitting out on a porch in South Georgia. It was nearly ruined when Amber got it. “I’ve had it restored now. It’s really pretty and it makes me think of her,” Amber says. “The sewing machine is a representation of her life.”
I think of my mother’s old Kenmore sewing machine, a gift from her parents on her 21st birthday. I remember all the Easter outfits, the doll dresses and the quilts she made over the years. Behind me, one quilt in particular hangs on the wall. It is stitched with tulips, purple cone flowers, lilies, trumpet creepers-all the fl ow-ers that grew in our garden.