If you had to suddenly flee your home, leave your country, and only take whatever possessions you could carry, what would they be? Money? Jewelry? Photos? A special book or musical instrument?
My grandmother grabbed her pillow.
Litzi, my maternal grandmother, wasn’t typically forthcoming with stories of her traumatic past as a Vienna socialite-turned-Holocaust-refugee. However, when I was about 10 years old, she told me about the dense goose down pillow crowning the twin bed in her tiny Chicago apartment.
In her thick Austrian accent, she’d say, “This is the only thing I have left from home. It was my favorite pillow, and I grabbed it when we had to flee.”
Why a pillow? I wondered. Then surmised, “Oh, what a great way to hide your expensive jewelry! Quick thinking, Grandmum!” I couldn’t imagine any other reason for a pillow being the one and only thing to grab from a huge household of valuable treasures.
“No, no…I just wanted my pillow.” She shrugged, with that distinct, vacant gaze I’d see whenever I asked for details about her former life in Vienna.
A touching story but still I shook my head, incredulous.
I hadn’t thought about the pillow in a long time, until eight years ago when I embarked on a major purge in preparation for downsizing from a largish house to a smallish condo.
My mother, Litzi’s daughter, had become more of a hoarder as she aged. This was likely the result of not adequately dealing with the trauma of her refugee childhood and extreme poverty, the ultimate reversal of her previous generation’s wealth.
After my mother died, my husband and I confronted piles of QVC and department store clothing, housewares, and trinket purchases stacked floor to ceiling in her home, much of it still in their original bags. Most items we donated or dismally tossed into a rented trash dumpster, and some boxes ended up in our basement. Years earlier, when Litzi died, my mother had acquired her beloved pillow, but it was apparently lost in the chaos of the cleanout. What was once a treasured item and sole symbol of home ironically became a victim of pathological overabundance.
In making the decision to downsize, I vowed never to make my own children deal with too much of our stuff. The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up became my bible and Marie Kondo my guru. Over a full year, I spent countless hours in our basement, going through boxes of every kind of household item imaginable, very little of it making the cut. It was, essentially, an archeological dig of our immediate and extended families’ lives, spanning decades. The process was stifling.
I was driven and ruthless, sorting, tossing, and donating. Whenever I’d waver, I thought of my mother’s hoarder home. In the end, I was proud of how very little made it to the keep pile.
One afternoon, announcing “I’m going down to the dig,” I took some deep inner-resource-gathering breaths, visualized our pristine waiting condo, and resolutely descended the stairs to the basement. I opened boxes filled with Ghostbusters and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle action figures, exclaiming, “I’ve hit the 80s!” and moved them to the “get one of our kids to try to sell this on eBay” pile.
Then I got to my mother’s boxes, most filled with long-forgotten photographs. A project for another day. The next box was full of linens—some new, still in the package, and the rest crisply washed, ironed, and folded. The decades-old starch scent brought a flood of childhood memories of my favorite Mary Poppins sheets and my old bedroom. As I dug through the linens, moving them one by one to the donate pile, I caught a glimpse of—could it be?—yes! Mary Poppins pillowcases!
The brightly colored pillowcases depict Mary with rosy cheeks holding her red umbrella in one hand and Michael and Jane Banks’ hands in the other as they fly above the rooftops of London. Her magical rose-bedecked bag is flying along with them. As a child, I couldn’t imagine anything more exciting and fun. These pillowcases inspired dreams of travel, whimsy, song, and dance, along with many stories and games.
“Ohmygod, Mary!” I exclaimed. It was like seeing a beloved friend after 50 years. Digging deeper, I found more of my childhood pillowcases—Batman, ice dancers, circus animals—which together with the music and magic of Mary Poppins basically defined my young emerging personality, foreshadowing who I am to this day. The pillowcases could easily justify a small amount of space in our downsized linen closet. Definite keepers!
Now, when our two young grandsons sleep over, I let them choose which pillowcase they want to sleep on. “What do you want to dream about?” I ask. “Fighting crime with Batman? Flying over London with Mary Poppins?”
The 4-year-old, an avowed animal lover, always picks the circus animals. “I want to pet a lion!” he exclaims happily.
The 7-year-old has cycled through all the options depending on his mood. During the winter Olympics, he dreamt of being a figure skater and opted for the ice dancers.
I see these joy-sparking pillowcases whenever I open my linen closet and wonder if they will persist through future generations.
I imagine my grandkids saying, “These are some of the few things my grandmother kept when she downsized.” Maybe they’ll even remember the story about Litzi’s goose down pillow from Vienna.
Families can have all kinds of legacies—good and bad. I’d always assumed ours was about persecution, perseverance, survival, and trauma.
But I’ve come to realize that our family legacy is actually about pillows, and my pillowcases are constant, colorful reminders. After generations of persecution, we have survived and rebuilt beautiful lives in new places. The trauma is subsiding. What has persisted is that we carry peace, home, comfort, rest, and relaxation wherever we go.
We carry the freedom to dream.
Elizabeth Surlin Gordon lives in the Chicago area and writes poetry, essays, middle grade/YA fiction, and a holistic wellness column for Our Evanston magazine. Over the pandemic, she wrote the children’s book, Where Is Everybody? Her work has been published in BAC Street Journal, Point of View, East on Central, and 10th Ward Lit. When not writing, Elizabeth loves musical theatre, travel, QiGong, making music, art, and stories with her two young grandsons, and resting on pillows.
Object-ives features flash nonfiction essays of 500-999 words on the possessions we can’t stop thinking about.
Recommended reading on possessions:
“Old Jewelry on Old Paper: Understanding Jewelry Through Antique Catalogs and Ephemera” by Accidental Antiquarian
“10 uses for a pocket notebook to keep you off your phone” by Amy Catriona
“Someone Found a Box Full of ’80s Transformers on the Curb, and It Is Every Collector’s Dream” by Vaspaan Dastoor, Comicbook.com
“Can Thrifting Be A Form Of Overconsumption?” by Elizabeth Whitehead, Refinery29
A lovely, comfy pillow full of family history. I love pillows and pillow cases, and we have plenty, even living on our small sailboat.
What a beautiful story about the connection to the past. It's so fascinating to me what one person or generation feels is their heirloom or legacy.