Abandoned Mementos
A recent estate sale featured too much abandoned needlework, too many personal mementos. This kind of thing tugs at my heart, particularly when I know there are family members who survive the deceased – and probably made arrangements for the sale. As an antiques dealer, I shouldn’t care – it’s all just stuff to be purchased and resold. Right?
The ad for the estate sale listed the usual worn furnishings, ‘vintage’ clothing, souvenirs from world travels, fancy work, and musty books. While normally I don’t collect contemporary photographs, the ad showed a few unusual photographs of women engaging in needle work.
There must have been a little story there. So I went to the sale hoping to look at the photographs more closely.
Martha Deever Matteson (1942-2019) and met her husband Mervyn at Otterbein College where she studied education while he prepared for seminary. They married in 1963 and Martha taught first grade in Dayton elementary schools while Merwyn completed training for the ministry. Along the way, four children appeared to complete the family.
So far, the story has a straightforward narrative – mid-century housewife and mother, focused on supporting her husband’s Methodist ministry while raising their children.
But in 1984, Martha got a call. The Call. She enrolled in Dayton’s United Theological Seminary. Upon completing a Master of Divinity in 1987, Martha pastored in several churches around central Ohio. She was known as a passionate advocate for children, social justice, LGBTQ issues and women clergy.
I’m sorry I met her only through the remnants of the estate. I might have enjoyed attending her congregations.
Then came another Call.
With a diagnosis in 1998, Parkinson’s Disease tried to catch Martha. Undoubtedly, it changed the focus of her ministry, perhaps even bringing her to retire from ministerial duties. But she gave the illness no quarter – in retirement, she continued to support social justice initiatives and the couple traveled across the world. She wrote and published two books. The first, Instructions Not Included, about parenting, and Haiku From My Journey, a collection of poems reflecting on past and present. Not content to simply publish her books, Martha presented author meet-and-greets where she spoke about the challenges of parenting and the tribulations of increasing frailty.
With eerie foreshadowing of the estate sale, Martha’s haiku about disease and death revealed her feelings:
Going, going, gone! Like an auctioneer selling – My health disappears.
Another poem in Haiku From My Journey hints that Martha had practiced knitting. In it, she writes of knitting for her children and grandchildren, continuing to ply her knitting needles even as Parkinson’s Disease progressed.
Fifty years of yarn Soft against my fingertips, Now a memory.
Otherwise, nothing else in the estate suggested Martha engaged in other forms of needlework. Rather, she collected gifts of needlework. Among her possessions was a sacramental stole made for her by classmates from the theological seminary. The 108-inch long stole is a marvel of appliqué and embroidery commemorating the wonders of creation. Smaller pieces, presumably gifts from parishioners or friends, included needlepoint bell pulls, and hoop-mounted crewel work.
But the dearest thing of all was a shadow box filed with an assortment of treasures — kid opera gloves, sterling silver thimbles, and uniquely shaped pearl buttons. Martha curated family history and valued the needlework skills passed from one generation to the next. Later, reading through Haiku From My Journey, I found this ode to ‘Grandma Myrtle:’
Hands, young and supple,
Brushing canvas with color –
Myrtle, the artist.
Hands, strong, hard-working
Caring for family needs –
No time now for art.
Hands, old and wrinkled,
Mixing color through fabric
This, too, is an art.
Hands, now stilled in death,
Creating beauty no more,
But her art lives on.
So, too, for Martha whose collection lives on. At least in small ways she is remembered -- here by a sentimental antiques dealer and in the hearts she touched along her journey -- as a pastor and poet, mother and granddaughter, counselor and friend.
