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Last Saturday, I volunteered with the Migrant and Refugee Services branch of Louisville Catholic Charities. The program collects, sorts, and delivers household and clothing items to immigrant and refugee newcomers across the metro area, and so I spent my Saturday morning digging through and subsequently sorting the contents of rather suspicious looking boxes and trash bags. In addition to throw pillows, durable pots and pans, and drinking glasses, I found several less than desirable items: a pocketknife, an assortment of small paper bags, a Benadryl tablet, the password for a likely defunct WiFi router, and 83 cents, to name a few. Mostly, though, I spent my time volunteering considering the significance of the items immediately in front of me, and, more broadly, the meaning attached to material things.
At home, my family maintains a small collection of dining china; at least, we maintain it for the 364 days of the year that aren’t Thanksgiving, as we actually eat from the dishes on that occasion. My mother inherited the set from her grandmother, who received it from a guest at her wedding in 1945. The set moved with my grandmother from house to house, accompanied my mom from Ohio to Kentucky, and now sits in a display cabinet which rattles if you walk too close to it. Consequently, I have always been somewhat wary of the china set, and, while I still get nervous to walk near the back wall of my dining room, I have also come to appreciate the dishes for their place in my family’s history. I wonder, sometimes, about all those other Thanksgivings. I wonder whether the people who used the dishes considered where they would one day end up, or whether they wondered about the people who used them previously. Perhaps not, but the dishes persisted beyond many of them regardless.
My family’s china might one day end up in a donation center similar to that of Catholic Charities, but I find that almost reassuring, in a way. I unpacked several boxes worth of glasses and plates during my short time volunteering, and I thought about the families who would keep the items with them for the next several decades. Someday, another grandmother might give the same dishes I unpacked to their grandchild, who might save them for special occasions, or who might donate them somewhere else. I think there’s something sort of comforting about that permanence, and I like the idea that objects accumulate experience in time with the people who use them. My great grandmother passed away in 2018, but the china still contains a little record of her life, and I still think of her when I hear it rattle in the cabinet at home. I hope that the donated china, too, will one day inspire a similar reaction.
Megan Crowley is a McConnell Scholar in the class of 2025. She is studying political science and philosophy at the University of Louisville.