Daughters of Promise November/December 2014 | Page 61

however. In Gilman’s book, it is a small blanket; for
Polacco, it is a fine and expensive tea set.
The child in each story draws a sense of security
from the use of the treasured item in the rhythms of
daily life. Joseph loves his blanket and brings it to
his grandfather, its maker, to find new uses for it as it
becomes more and more worn. Anna’s family uses
the tea set, her parent’s wedding gift, as Shabbot
begins. The treasures are placeholders, so to speak;
representations of other securities in the children’s
lives.
Over time, however, the treasured items are lost or
altered. Joseph’s blanket becomes so small that his
grandfather finally uses it to cover a button for Joseph.
And one day, even the button is lost. Anna’s family
is subject to the Russian pogroms and has to flee with
what they can carry. Eventually, they leave most of
the tea set as a gift for the kind Gentile doctor who
arranges their passage to America.
So what makes a treasured item and why is it highly
valued (apart from monetary worth)?
It seems to me that, first, treasures are items of quality.
Interestingly, we are richer and more materialistic
than in times past. At the same time, we have easy
access to mounds of mass produced goods that are
not designed to last long. The result is a likelihood
to possess a lot, but in a proliferation of low- to midgrade quality. This stands in contrast to the families of
Polacco’s and Gilman’s books, who have little but still
own an item or two of beauty and quality.
If a treasured item is one of quality, it will then be
expensive. It will cost something. This is not the
lampshade project that you hot glued together one
afternoon and discovered that the blogger was right:
it did take only twenty minutes! It did cost basically
nothing! No, treasured items require patience, time,
and care. If you are the maker of it, you’ll reckon with
that cost. If you are the buyer of it, you’ll reckon with
the cost its creation required of someone else.
After the hurdle of ownership, treasures wend their
way, in some form or other, into use. This was the
portion in the children’s books that took me by
surprise. I thought about how differently Joseph and
Anna would have felt toward the treasures if the
items had been off limits. A blanket is one thing, but
the wedding tea set quite another. I imagined my
tendency, if I were the mother in the story, to keep
that rich and rare gift under wraps---literally. Wrap it
in blankets and keep it shrouded in a storage chest.
Never fully enjoy it because I so feared losing it and
never let my children enjoy it