Show Me: Front Door and Something Sentimental

Robert at Thoughts of a Father is trying his hand at a photo meme. He has named it Show Me and each day he will ask us to "show him" a specific place or thing. Today is Day4 and the theme is "something that has sentimental value to you." I'm also posting my front door since I skipped yesterday.

This is my front door from the inside. It is one of Angel's life dreams to escape out this door. This means that I keep a small window screen across the bottom to make sure she stays in. So far it has worked, although it makes coming IN rather inconvenient for others. The mask on the far wall is a special treasure I got when I visited Jamaica many years ago. The butterfly on the other side, I got in Aruba, though I think it was made in Venezuela.


Oddly, I'm having a hard time with finding something "sentimental." I used to think of myself as very sentimental, but I'm really not so much that way any more. Maybe it's an age thing. Maybe it's because when I was forced to move 5 times in 5 years I had to let go of a lot of things. Maybe it's because the little knick-knacks and things that are special "treasures," are physically difficult for me to maintain these days. They feel less like treasures than they used to, more like dusty things that make me ashamed of my inability to care for them. Here are a few of them, though.

The little lamb is almost as old as I am. It's kind of ugly, but I've had it since I was a little child back in the Dark Ages. Next to the lamb is a Thai Demon Guard. It was given to me by a friend of mine in New York after she returned from the trip of a life-time to Thailand. You're supposed to hang in facing the front door and it keeps demons out. Seems to be working. It's been watching over me and mine for about 25 years now and is one of the first things I hang when I move into a new place. Below the little lamb is the only one of my mother's Hummel's I've kept. Back before my sentimentality began to wane I had about 11 of them. The rest (she had quite a few) were shared out to my brother and my sister's children. This little angel has a broken wing but I'm very fond of her anyway. Next to the angel is an eskimo carving that my sister's children pooled in on many years ago. Besides the fact that I like it, it's a gift from the three of them and that makes it special. The elephants on the bottom row belonged to my mother too. She loved elephants and this is one I gave her... mother and child. What I wanted from my mother but never quite got, I guess. The last item is a little ornament. I'm not sure where it came from. It's a lute, but it makes me think of my father who played the mandolin. A big part of my relationship with my father centered around music. I would sit at the piano and play and sing and he would play his mandolin. He was often drunk for these sessions and there was a lot of complex family drama around them, but they are none-the-less among my happier memories. I really miss having a piano. So that's my journey into sentimentality.