Cradle



Anna, 1954, Kodachrome

If you 've been with us a while you’ll remember I posted about The Cradle – the one we ran into at the Salvation Army in 1951 while looking for a used bookcase. 
Just before that bookcase search, our neighbor, who was a Mayflower descendant, had shown me a really old cradle handed down in her family, with the names of babies carved on the underside.  Lovely tradition.  So that day we bought not only the bookcase ($2), but also the cradle ($3), though I remember thinking regretfully, “It’s really too late to start a tradition, it’s 1951 and everything has already happened.” 

Since then our family and friends have written more than 30 names and dates on the tag we tied to this cradle.  It's travelled to Hawaii, it’s been to Canada, and today it’s in Milwaukee for  Athena, who's just a couple of weeks old. Years ago her grandmother made crib bumpers when Athena’s mother slept here, but those are no longer politically correct, so this time around she made a lacy liner.

 

Athena, 2014, E-mail

Now that we have the Internet, I’ve done a little research – this cradle may not have been at Plymouth Rock, but it does date back to the 1800s.  And I'm wiser now -- I know that not everything has already happened.

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