When my husband’s Aunt Marie died in 1996, he learned he was mentioned in her will. She left him a cut-glass pickle dish that we take down from the top shelf in the cupboard and use every Thanksgiving. It is one of several items in my kitchen that I associate with the women in our family.
They include a tin cookie-press that my mother-in-law passed down to me along with her recipe for Christmas spritz cookies and a wooden rolling pin that my mother received for her bridal shower in 1952 but never used. She had little interest in cooking and never made a single pie crust, so the rolling pin ended up in the junk drawer and later with me.
Even better than Aunt Marie’s pickle dish are the letters she wrote to her sister Bernice in the 1940s when she was a home economics teacher in Nelson, Nebraska. The letters are part Little House on the Prairie and Willa Cather’s O Pioneers!
In one she writes:
The Sophomore and Senior girls are making winter dresses. It worries me for fear they will cut something wrong and ruin their material. One little girl had all the buttonholes cut and made wrong and I made her rip them out and do it over. And she’s the banker’s daughter, too, and her aunt is principal of the grade school. But I can’t help that. She’ll make those buttonholes right if it takes until Christmas.
Aunt Marie’s teaching job required home visits to 70 girls and their families, after school and on Saturdays.
I rented a Model A Ford and did we travel (the Ford and I). Bernice, you can’t realize that these people live on as little as they do. Some of places I visited are just pitiful. This is where Home Ec should do so much, but can it? The standard of living has gone down so with lack of money, and with no money loss of health.
Aunt Marie’s travels include a trip to Lincoln, where she had her palm read for fun. The psychic predicted she would be out of teaching within the year. Apparently, there was no marriage in the picture at that time, either. The teachers in Nelson formed a club called IH, IH, IH for “old maids” who always say “I hope, I hope, I hope.”
We meet every 2 weeks on Monday night and sew and visit and sing.
The psychic was correct. Aunt Marie quit teaching in Nelson and took a government job in Broken Bow, Nebraska, as a “home management supervisor.” In a 1941 letter, her mother Mary wrote:
Her work will be something like this – drive over the county, visit homes of the poorer class, folks on relief, etc., figure out a budget for them, to get along on the least possible amount of money. In general, stick her nose in other people’s business.
In 1942, Marie wrote that her caseload is:
Somewhere between 450 and 475. But I love the hills, the country and the supervisors I work with. In short, I’m happy here.
Nowhere in these letters does she mention the pickle dish. Its provenance is unknown. ChatGPT estimates it is worth about $10 based on the description and similar pieces. How did it survive her moves and two marriages, including to Don Vetter, a widowed organic popcorn farmer in Aurora, Nebraska?
Willa Cather wrote that her mother used “worthless Confederate money” to wrap her delicate china when the family moved west from Virginia to the Great Plains. I like to think the pickle dish got a similar treatment from Aunt Marie as she parceled out her precious yet modest items to dozens of nieces and nephews. It deserves pride of place on our Thanksgiving table.
Anita's Way 
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