Aunt Esther’s Syrup Pitcher

A family story to celebrate the season.

This is a picture of my Great-Great-Aunt-Esther’s syrup pitcher. We get it out on special occasions, like Christmas Eve breakfast. Aunt Esther is my mother’s (Diane) mother’s (Elaine) mother’s (Lucy) sister (Esther). Lucy and Esther’s mother was Allie (My Great-Great-Grandmother).

Aunt Esther married a Catholic. This was a very big deal in 1920. She converted to Catholicism before the wedding but his family still had the gall to cordon off the rest of our family in a little tiny section at the back of the church for the ceremony. It’s 90 years later. We’re still not over it. Whenever Esther or her kids come up in conversation someone will say, “Did you know that his family made us sit in the back of the church?!” This is Lucy and Allie we’re talking about. Made to sit in the back of a church. By papists with their fancy airs. Not over it. Not over it at all. Not planning to get over it.

Aunt Esther lived close to her sister Lucy with their respective families. When my grandmother ran away from home at the age of 9 because her mother Lucy asked her to beat an egg (an intolerable, slavery-level request to the 9 year old), she ran straight to Aunt Esther. Aunt Esther and my grandmother Elaine were always close.

Aunt Esther had two sons – Richard and Donny. When they were 7 and 3, and she 35, Aunt Esther died without warning of heart failure. Esther’s sister Lucy took in the boys and raised them. Their father had them on the weekends but apparently it wasn’t customary for a single man to rear his children alone. In any case, in our family Lucy took in the boys and raised them with her own sons. My grandmother was married and out of the house by this time.

Our family was pretty normal. Lucy’s husband was a barber. He owned his own shop. Lucy and Esther’s father was a captain on the Great Lakes. I believe Esther’s husband was a salesman, but correct me on this point if I have it wrong. And Esther was young, she hadn’t had time to acquire objects to pass down. Her sons got her wedding ring and what little jewelry she possessed, for their wives and daughters. The rest of the family got her dishes. The items she had chosen for her home, which could be handed out and down one at a time for the relatives who wanted something to remember her by.

My grandmother Elaine got Aunt Esther’s syrup pitcher. There’s nothing extraordinary about it, except that it was chosen by Esther and it was hers. It was in my grandmother’s china cabinet all of her adult life. And when my grandmother gave away her china to the rest of the family, I asked for and received Aunt Esther’s syrup pitcher. It lives with my most precious pieces as well.

Merry Christmas, Aunt Esther, all the way from 2007. Thank you for the syrup pitcher.