THE CEDAR CHEST

Mom and Dad on their wedding day August 25, l945.

     When my Mom graduated from Fairfax High School at sixteen (soon to be seventeen on the Fourth of July 1944) she went to work for the Federal Government.  Her parents moved the family from The Pink House, and some of you will know what house I'm talking about but it wasn't pink then, in Clifton VA to Cameron Valley in Alexandria VA to housing built for the influx of workers who had come from all over the country to work for the war effort.  The war was World War II and her parents were already working at the Torpedo Plant.  The move to Alexandria was because gasoline was rationed and hard to come by.  With the money she earned working in her very first job she bought a bedroom set for herself and a cedar chest.

     The cedar chest was a hope chest.  In it she put the sheets and linens and treasures she was saving for her  marriage to her own true love.  That was my Dad who was her first cousin's pen pal.  When  Dad came to finally meet Mae he found she towered over him but Mom was just right.  This was okay with Mae because Dad introduced her to his friend Warren and they became a couple.  Dad and Mom and Mae and Warren were close friends all their lives.

My guest bedroom and the cedar chest.

     The cedar chest was always at the base of their bed but when my parents moved from the country on Popes Head Road into the Town of Fairfax in 1958 Mom put the cedar chest in the bedroom I shared with my sister Linda and we displayed our dolls and stuffed animals on top.  The cedar chest held treasured baby clothes, love letters, pictures and wedding portraits, and the little powder blue suit Mom was married in.  I could wear it when I was a freshman in high school and I did as a Halloween costume.  The skirt was short because styles were very short during WWII and it was a little snug.  I thought of myself as a kind of hillbilly Li'l Abner type character so I pulled my hair up and put a Minnie Pearl hat on my head with a flower sticking straight up.  Linda and I went trick-or-treating with Pat McGhee and Judy Norwood and Tina Meyers in Green Acres.  I think Pat's sister Deenie was with us.  We trick-or-treated at the house my parents eventually bought in 1965.  Tina's mom was supposed to drive us home but somehow there was a miss communication and we kids ended up walking home cutting through where they were building the new administrative building on University Drive.  It was scary.

     When United Airlines transferred my parents to San Francisco in 1966 the cedar chest stayed with Linda and eventually became her three boy's toy chest.  When she and her family moved to Phoenix AZ in 1979 she left it at my Grandmother's house on Popes Head Road in the basement where it stayed for years.  Dad retired from United Airlines in 1978 and Mom and Dad returned to Virginia to the house on Popes Head.  In 1994 when Rod and I became engaged after dating cross country for four years I transferred from United Air Lines Washington Reservation Center to  the San Francisco Reservation Center and I took the cedar chest with me.  United allowed me 500 lbs. of personal possessions which they flew out for me for  free.  Rod and I were married June 24, 1995 in a ceremony at our home.

I just had Mom's cedar chest repaired and refinished this year.  It sits at the foot of the bed in my guest bedroom and holds linens.  I treasure it.  As for the bedroom set Mom bought at the same time as the cedar chest with the money she made from her first job my parents still owned it at the end of their lives.  Momma passed in 1998 and Daddy in 2009.