The Things We Inherit

When my mom died, I inherited her custom wedding ring, thousands of pieces of beach glass, a warehouse full of history, endless unshredded paperwork, a purposeful stride, and a reserve supply of moxie that seems to appear precisely when I've run out of obvious options. There’s more, of course. The mom phrases repeated throughout my life that come to mind at the most (or least) opportune moments, the tendency to overthink rather than listen to my gut that was definitely right the first time, and a million other little things that I probably don’t even realize I picked up from her.

Inheritance is funny that way. Some of it comes in boxes. Some of it requires a lawyer. Some of it has been sitting in your bones so long that you don't realize it belonged to someone else first.

My mom, Gwen, and I worked together at Bayberry Cottage for over twenty years. Which means I inherited plenty from her long before she died.

Mom collected beach glass. For decades, she walked the beaches of Lake Michigan and noticed the little pieces most people walked right past.

Beach glass is a lot like hunting morels. You won’t see it at first, but once you train your eye, you can’t not see it. She'd come home from an ordinary walk with five pieces. Ten. Twenty. Green and white and brown, the occasional coveted blue or pink. Tiny pieces of something broken, tumbled around long enough to become treasure.

Over the years, she collected thousands and I have much of her cherished collection now. Quick story: once, when she had her home listed for sale, she shared with me that she hoped someone would tour the house and make her the kind of offer she couldn’t turn down if she included this collection. I quickly let her know how I felt about that. 😡 I don’t care how much this imaginary buyer offers, the beach glass is off the table.

I also have her ring, custom-made and completely, unmistakably hers. It is stunning.

And I have a warehouse worth of history shoved into my barn. There is nothing poetic about the warehouse.

Well, that's not entirely true. There were twenty years of Bayberry history in there. Things we chose. Things we didn’t sell. Things we thought we'd use someday. Remnants of displays and projects and entire chapters of our lives. And in my barn, it carries much the same vibe it held in our downtown warehouse: equal parts overwhelm and opportunity. That’s poetic I suppose.

There is also a truly baffling amount of paperwork my mother apparently believed should be preserved for future generations.

Not everything we inherit is beach glass.

And not everything we inherit is a thing.

Mom taught me to tip well, to be kind but not nice, to listen to The Lake and the birds, and to write what I felt to try to get to the truth. And as I discussed in the last journal entry, EDIT.

Edit, edit, edit.

She said it constantly. Take something away. Look again. Take something else away. Just because something made its way into a room doesn't mean it has earned the right to stay there forever. But she also believed every house needed a boat on the ceiling.

At some point, Mom saw a designer who had hung a boat from a ceiling. I think it was in a magazine. Maybe an interview. I don't remember anymore, and honestly, the original story doesn't matter much. What mattered was what she took from it.

Every house deserved one moment unlike anything you'd seen anywhere else, but completely, unmistakably like the people who lived there. After that, at some point during nearly every project, she'd ask:

Where's our boat on the ceiling?

It was never actually about the boat. It was permission to stop being correct. To make the room personal. To leave room for delight. To do the thing that might make someone raise an eyebrow but would make the people who lived there grin every time they walked past it. In my house, that’s Zeus, a life-size bust of the ruler of Olympus and professional menace, gifted to me in my 20s by someone who knew me and my weird sense of humor. He made my mom raise an eyebrow, and still makes me grin every day.

Edit, edit, edit.

And then, when you've cleared away all the noise, give them something worth remembering. I clearly inherited that.

I inherited other things from her that took me longer to recognize. I inherited her stride. Some of my earliest memories are of walking hand in hand with Mom and basically running to keep up. She did not stroll. She had somewhere to be, and apparently my little legs were expected to figure it out.

Years later, when we traveled to trade markets together for Bayberry, nothing had changed. We had three days to get through the whole thing, and we could not miss anything. There were showrooms to see, vendors to find, ideas around every corner. We walked fast and I still do.

And one of my favorites: when I've run out of obvious options, my moxie shows up. It's not something I summon intentionally. Things get difficult, the available choices disappear, and somewhere inside me a switch flips. Fine. Then we'll find another way.

There have been moments since Mom died when I've felt it happen and thought, Oh. Hey Mama.

Or maybe, after a lifetime of trying to keep up with her, some of it became me. That's another strange thing about inheritance. Eventually it becomes difficult to tell where they end and you begin.

For a long time, I wasn't sure how to build something of my own without defining it against what came before. Color Theory couldn't simply be Bayberry Cottage. It couldn't be my mother's business with a new logo.

I needed to know what was mine. How I sounded. What I believed. What I wanted to carry forward and what I wanted to do differently. And through my own self-editing, I've realized that becoming your own person doesn't require pretending you arrived here alone.

We all live among things we've inherited.

Sometimes literally. Your grandmother's china. Your father's chair. The painting nobody particularly likes but everyone is afraid to get rid of. A box of photographs. A ring. Thirty years of beach glass.

Sometimes it's the house itself. Someone else's kitchen. Someone else's wallpaper.

And sometimes what we inherit isn't visible at all:

• Rules about what a “nice” house looks like.

• A fear of wasting money.

• A tendency to save everything.

• A belief that matching means finished.

• The conviction that we need to save our best things for our best days.

  
  

We inherit stories about our homes right alongside the things inside them, but eventually, we edit and decide what still belongs. Sometimes that’s the part we can confuse with disloyalty.

Editing an inheritance isn't the same as rejecting it. You can adore the person who gave you the china and not want the china (full transparency: I kept Great Grandma’s china).

You can keep the chair and change the fabric. You can treasure a lifetime of collecting without believing every single piece must remain exactly where your mother left it. You can keep the lesson and let go of the evidence. Love isn't measured in square footage of storage - in the barn or in your brain.

I'm still figuring out what stays. There are things of hers I will carry for the rest of my life. There are things I am ready to release. And there are things I haven't figured out yet, and that's okay too. Because perhaps inheritance isn't really about preserving everything exactly as we received it.

Maybe it's about noticing: What is worth bending down for? What deserves to come home with us? What has done its job and can be released? What can I edit until I recognize myself in it? And, when all the obvious answers have been exhausted:

Where's our boat on the ceiling?

I’m building Color Theory because I finally understand that I get to choose what I do with what I inherited. Thanks, Mom. We’ll take it from here. 

And someday, the things I choose now will become someone else’s inheritance. The objects, maybe. But hopefully also the curiosity. The moxie. The permission to change something that isn't working. The instinct to notice what other people walk past.

And the absolute certainty that every now and then, a perfectly sensible room needs a boat on the ceiling.