It’s surprisingly difficult and dirty work. But it’s also a privilege and an honor to have so much that needs polishing.
Some pieces are thrift store finds and some are hundred-year-old family heirlooms that found their way in to my grateful hands. I take the responsibility seriously.
I was 12 when my only living grandmother died. She was the authority on all things Southern. And of grammar and life. No paten leather shoes after 5. Streak your hair, pierce your ears, and do not wear white after Labor Day—a rule that’s taken me 22 years to finally break (and only to feel slightly guilty about… slightly).
But after she passed I learned that she left me two very specific things. Her diamond earrings and her silver collection.
Until then, I had not paid attention to the silver. It was just the decor in the dining room and little fixtures around her home. It wasn’t gawked over, and of course the children’s table was not privy to the sterling flatware at Christmas. Why would she leave it to me? I understood the earrings. Much to her annoyance, my ears were not pierced. She left them to me as one final “pierce your ears!” Anne didn’t do anything without calculations and poetry. This silver must be important.
I didn’t lay eyes on this collection again until my twenties. Only worthy to receive it when I had my own home and a betrothed. I only had vague memories of what was in it, but The Silver that was destined for me fascinated me for years. The women who owned it did too.
As I decorated my college homes, I kept stumbling upon pieces tarnished and thrown in boxes on the floors of thrift stores. Who is giving this away!? These women fascinated me too. As a kid in my parents home, I don’t remember much silver, except for maybe on the specialist of occasions. It was kept in closets and hutches, away from prying eyes and children. And even now, my mother chooses to pull out her festive stainless flatware instead of the silver for Christmas dinner. She says it’s prettier and I agree. Also less of a pain to clean.
The modern woman: tucking grandmother’s china, silver, and crystal away in favor of durability and the dishwasher. A generation waiting for their daughters to be old enough to pass off the sideboard worth of china tea cups. Little did they know we would welcome it and create our own movement—grandmillennials, buried in estate sale china. Of course we still strongly favor our dishwashers.
But there is something special about the delicate task of cleaning and polishing the silver. For me, almost religious. The Wrights Silver Polish completes the connection to the generations before me as my hands gently rub the tarnish off the same fork my great-grandmother held a hundred years ago. The same one that my grandmother washed and placed back in its velvet box the day after every Christmas for forty years. The legacy all southern women hope for: that their names and possessions trickle down to their granddaughters. It threads us together.
But this particular collection of silver is so much more than trays given as wedding gifts, my great-grandmother’s serveware, or even my great-great-grandmother’s tea set. This collection contains awards and trophies. Silver bowls and champagne buckets handed out as debate team prizes and literary awards for decades. It even contains the Grande Baroque tray engraved “Alumni of the Year” – an gift from Samford University. These are the legacy of my Grandmother’s work.
So I display them proudly on my walls and hutches. I put it to work and use it frequently. That’s what it’s for, and what certainly what those old women would have done. The small bowls are scattered about as candy dishes, the larger ones hold cheese straws and flowers arrangements. I even had my wedding flowers arranged in the champagne bucket that now grows paperwhites at Christmas. And my sterling flatware comes out on every celebratory occasion.
Its “Rose Point” by Wallace, by the way. And you better believe that I am a proud Southern woman to announce it when someone asks my silver pattern.
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