WATCHES AND CHICKEN FEET

My mother used to talk about past times when the future was uncertain and money was short. Even though I gave her little attention at the time, not yet having discovered the joys of story-gathering, I still remember her basic themes. ”Times were hard but we were resourceful. People helped each other out.” She told the stories with passion, with pride, with a fond remembrance. That’s what I recall.
Though I have given Mom’s stories little thought, they now come back to me, riding the wave of current interest in hope as a relevant companion during economic chaos and shrinkage. It’s not the difficult content that comes to me, though I do recall the one and only occasion when she used her best culinary skill to prepare a tasty batch of chicken feet and taught me how to squeeze the meat out of the toes.
”Chicken feet were a treat for us,” she told me. ”We didn’t have much to eat.”
Now that I am remembering, I also recall the tiny elegant watch on a slim silver band that lasted her more than fifty years. “I knitted a very fancy sweater for a man who had been jilted by his fiancé,” she told me. ”He had bought this watch for her and now he had no use for it. It was very expensive, completely out of my range. I couldn’t buy it from him, but he was happy to trade it to me for a hand-knit sweater.”
I had no context in which to understand these stories when first she told them to me. She probably thought I had not heard. They may have been vaguely interesting, but certainly had no relevance. We had money for watches and there was no reason why a person with unlimited access to chicken legs and thighs would bother with chicken’s feet.
I think she’d be pleased to know that the themes came back to me, followed by the content, just when I needed evidence to support the theory that hope abides when wealth is threatened.