04/04/2018
I've been busy at work with Still Life Stories - hope you will check it out and spread the word.
It’s the type of household object so common that it is easily overlooked, but that rolling pin was the main thing Sharon Zimmerman wanted as she raced from her Santa Rosa home just before a wall of fire engulfed her neighborhood. Weeks later the Army Corps of Engineers cleared away the pile debris that was once her home, but Sharon and her family were safe. And she had her rolling pin.
Objects that surround us speak volumes about our lives. They tell our stories. By outward appearances, the rolling pin was nothing out of the ordinary - hand carved wood, about the same size as any other rolling pin one might find but somehow even simpler—no handles or moving parts, only a long, round piece of wood. Sharon had owned it for less than a year. Here though, as with so many facets of life, is where details make the difference.
The pin was given to Sharon on a trip to Sweden last year, by Torbjorn, her brylling (Swedish for first cousin three times removed) who she had never met before. Torbjorn and Sharon have the same great great grandparents August and Marie Johansson. Her great grandfather Albert came to the US when he was 18 and left his younger sister Olivia (who was Torbjorns great grandmother) who was 3 years younger in Sweden. They were very close and stayed in touch by letters. It was an heirloom, they told her, in the family since the 1700s. When Torbjorn gave Sharon the rolling pin he simply said, “I want you to have this as you don’t have anything from this side of the family.”
For her, it was a connector—a tangible link not only to relatives on the opposite side of the planet, but to ancestors dating back centuries, a tie to another time and another way of life. A reminder about where she herself might have ended up had not somebody somewhere along the line decided to set out for the new world. It was not the type of thing that she was ready to let burn.
