Joannie is now getting Mother and Daddy’s house ready to sell. A lifetime of things, most of them only of sentimental value. But Joannie is very sentimental, so this is hard. Some things, she is shipping to me — like the contents of Mother’s piano bench — because it is too hard for her to toss them into the dumpster.

She shipped some of Mama Harrison’s dishes all the way to Maui for Mary-Margaret.

Today, FEDEX delivered this to 1880. So much foam and bubble wrap.

It’s very old and very fragile, but it arrived in perfect shape.

It was brought back to the United States over 100 years ago by my maternal grandfather, Papa Harrison. I have no idea how.

He was shipped out from Oklahoma in 1919 to Vladivostok. He was eighteen. Joannie found a copy of his deployment papers. Fort Mason, San Francisco. They read: “Siberian Replacement Company.” I wonder what was in the mind of a teenage Indian boy from Oklahoma?

It reads “med corps” I wonder what that means his job was.

This ewer always had a place of honor in all the houses Mother and Daddy lived in. And there were quite a few. They lived the longest in this last one.

Now it has a place of honor in mine.