November 14th, 2022Travels with, and without, our vase by Jeff Glorfeld

MOST everyone has antiques of some kind in and around their
home, and by antique I don’t mean beat-up old slobs like me.
They might be in a prized collection, or just quirky stuff inherited
from a dear old aunt, or treasured family heirlooms. Webster’s dictionary defines
an antique as “a work of art, piece of furniture, or decorative object made at an
earlier period and according to various customs laws at least 100 years ago”.
According to Wikipedia, an antique “is usually an item that is collected or
desirable because of its age, beauty, rarity, condition, utility, personal emotional
connection, and/or other unique features”.
Firstly, collector or hoarder?
I think of myself as being between a collector and a hoarder. I have a stupid
amount of recorded music, stacks of books, and a huge stash of memorabilia.
Some of this stuff might be collectable, but is any of it antique?
As it turns out, I might actually have at least one genuine antique in among
my flotsam and jetsam, and having been made aware of it by my super sleuth
wife Carol, it got me to thinking about how a thing might wind up being old
enough to be an antique.
This antique of ours is a vase, average size, lovely, but not instantly
impressive. In my early 20s, in the mid-1970s, I moved into a nice little studio
cottage on the west side of Redding, California.
Redding, California
One of its best features was a shady little front courtyard. I didn’t know who
had lived there before me but everything about the place was clean and tidy. Out
in the courtyard, previous residents had left behind a few things, including a
lustrous, pretty vase, dusty and neglected but intact.
I was living in this cottage when I met Carol, the woman who was to become
my wife. We stayed there for several months and then began a nomadic existence
that was to last for many years. When we moved out of our cottage, packing up
our modest belongings, Carol added the lustrous, pretty vase to our collection.
After a few stops around Redding, we moved to San Francisco, where we
lived in three different apartments in four years.
Beijing, China
In 1983 our hunger for adventure took us to Beijing, China. We travelled
light, leaving our growing collection of stuff, including the lustrous, pretty vase,
in boxes in the care of my parents. What was supposed to be a year in China
became almost three, followed by four months in Australia and the promise of
permanent residency in a country we quickly came to love.
We returned to the US in December 1985 to formalise our Australian
residency and reunite ourselves with our belongings. It turned out that while we
were in China my parents had also moved into a new house and had shifted our
boxes into a warehouse owned by one of their friends.
At some point the warehouse had been flooded and some of our books and
furnishings had been ruined. We packed up what we could salvage and sent it to
Melbourne. Was this the lustrous, pretty vase’s first sea voyage?
St Kilda, Australia
We stopped in St Kilda in 1986 – not exactly settled – we moved a few times,
but in 1991 we again packed up our stuff, including the pretty little vase, and
returned to California.
That turned out to be a bad idea so in 1993 we once again tossed all our
accumulated goods into boxes and returned to St Kilda, eventually moving from
an apartment into our own place, where we unpacked the lustrous, pretty vase
once again.
Wheatsheaf
In 2001 everything was again stuffed into boxes to be shipped from St Kilda
to Wheatsheaf. Finally, it felt like we were home.
The lustrous, pretty vase was unpacked and placed on a shelf, admired and
wondered at, one of Carol’s prized possessions.
Travels with, and without, our vase by Jeff Glorfeld
And back to California
In 2018 we once again filled boxes and shipped all our stuff back to
California, where we now reside. The lustrous, pretty vase made another ocean
crossing – number four, by my reckoning – and took its place on a shelf alongside
our other treasures.
Recently, however, Carol the high-tech sleuth found that technology had
finally caught up with her curiosity.
We’d packed and unpacked the vase 20 times at least, its history went from
the very beginnings of our relationship right up to the present day, and who even
knew what its existence had been before joining up with our wandering caravan.
Now, the internet gave her the ability to track down the vase’s origins.
Cincinnati, Ohio
Carol had long-ago noticed distinctive markings etched into the bottom of
the lustrous, pretty vase. Now, patient web searching led her to the Rookwood
Pottery Company, of Cincinnati, Ohio, which, according to the company’s
website, was founded by Maria Longworth Storer in 1880, and is “the first large
manufacturing enterprise founded and owned by a woman in the United States
and launching the art pottery movement in America”.
Further markings on the bottom of the vase led Carol to discover that it
had been made by a potter named Harriet Elizabeth Wilcox, who worked at
Rookwood “for many years”. Very little is known about “Hattie”, according to
a collector website, except that “she decorated from 1886 until the 1930s”, and
that “collector interest in her pieces is considered to be average”.
Priceless
When people haul their stuff out to one of those Antiques Roadshow TV
shows, what do they think if it turns out their item is worth thousands? I don’t
know what our lustrous, pretty vase is worth in dollars, but in terms of my life
and history it is priceless.
After many happy years living in Victoria,
former Wheatsheaf resident Jeff Glorfeld,
and his wife Carol, went back to California,
where in the past four years he has survived
bushfires, snowstorms and drought. And
Trump. And Covid. The cicadas and locusts didn’t arrive… well, not yet.