My mom was a collector. She collected angels, elephants, Santas, witches, porcelain figures, greeting cards, stickers, mechanical pencils, yarn, art supplies, expensive art history books, ink stamps, beads, fabric, dragonfly jewelry, wooden fruit, bunnies….The list could go on for a while.
Perhaps the most memorable collection she had was her chicken collection. Over the span of about 25 years, she collected chicken dishes, ceramic chicken figures, glass chicken figures, a roll basket in the shape of a chicken, chicken egg salt and pepper shakers, plates with chickens on them, plates shaped like chickens, chicken cookie jars and my favorite, the tea set with fried egg saucers, black and white speckled cups and a teapot with an entire egg on top. Where did she find all of this stuff? Much of it was the result of her impressive (and sometimes excessive) shopping practices. But, the tea set? That was a gift from her daughters. I vaguely recall being really excited to give that to her one Christmas.
My mom’s excessive collections were often a source of amusement for us. We loved to make fun of her wooden fruit or jokingly count up the increasing number of chickens in the kitchen. 30? 40? More? I remember being in the kitchen with my mom and sister Marji in June of 2008, about a year before Mom died. As we celebrated the last few hours of my 33rd birthday, Marji cleaned my mom’s chicken collection. By that time, the collection took up an entire full-sized bookcase. As she took off the chickens one by one to dust them, we reminisced about where and when my mom collected them. While I don’t remember much of what was said, I do recall Marji spent a long time with those chickens. Partly because she was anal, but mostly because there were so many to clean and re-organize on the shelves.
If my mom were still alive, today would have been her 72nd birthday. Would I have given her a chicken as a present? Probably not. In the last decade of her life, I didn’t give her many chickens. She had mostly moved on to collecting art supplies. And I, never a great shopper to begin with, had gotten into the habit of avoiding shopping by giving generic gift cards.
But, as I remember her today on the fifth birthday that she has been dead, I wish I could give her a chicken. Some ridiculously elaborate ceramic chicken that took up half the counter and served no useful purpose. Maybe we would joke about it and I’d say, “remember when you used to collect chickens?”