Notes from the Spring Creek Arts Guild

The Museum of Everyday Life

Today has been full of memories and history already. First, as I was having my first sip of coffee, I saw an Instagram post by my friend, Helen, who lives in Northern Ireland. Helen is a bit older than me and is retired. This morning, she posted that she had dumped out her “work box,” a box where she keeps random sewing-related bits, as she deemed it a mess that needed sorted and cleaning. She found some personalized labels she had had made years ago to sew in her hand knits, along with some labels from her school uniform and Girl Guide uniform from when she was a child. She also found a pair of sewing scissors that had belonged to her husband’s grandmother. She says she will be tackling her mother-in-law’s work box next.

I was already in a nostalgic frame of mind because two days ago, my friend was visiting and we watched a show about a little girl in the late fifties and early sixties. While the character was a few years older than I, she still had the same haircut as I had, wore very similar clothes, and carried a book satchel nearly identical to the one I carried in elementary school. That got my brain to working on something I could not immediately put my finger on.

Now, I am remembering my trip to Glamis Castle in Scotland. This was the childhood home of Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother of Queen Elizabeth II, and the birthplace of Princess Margaret. It is my understanding that Elizabeth and Margaret spent much of their childhoods at Glamis Castle. It is a very interesting place to visit with tons of history, having been built in the 1300s. Still, one of the most interesting aspects to me was a special exhibit about Elizabeth and Margaret as children. Among the items on display are dresses worn by the late Queen Elizabeth II from babyhood up to about age six. These are normal, everyday dresses, not fancy dresses. They are mostly cotton and some of them even show repairs and stains, just like any child’s clothes would.

The thing I have realized in the past couple of days is that the dresses little Elizabeth wore in the late 1920s and early 1930s were nearly identical to those my mother wore in the 1940s, and to those I wore in the mid 1960s. I am thinking my generation may have been the last to wear these types of dresses on a daily basis—to school, to play, really everywhere. In elementary school in South Carolina, girls were not permitted to wear pants unless the weather was freezing, as in 32 degrees. Of course now I am wishing I had some of my childhood dresses and some of my mother’s.

I find myself wishing I had an archive of representative things from not only my life, but from generations before. I wish there was a museum of normal people things from years past, just like the little side museum of normal life things from Elizabeth’s childhood. I would love to be able to show my grandchild what everyday was like when I was her age, because I am realizing how very different things are now.