CONTENTS UNDER PRESSURE: HEIRLOOMS ARE IN THE EYE OF THE BEHOLDER

It's long been a joke in my family that you can't leave my aunt's house empty-handed.

Until recently, she always gave visitors food: leftover turkey, half a canned ham, part of a cake. Not only did she keep her freezer uncluttered, she made sure her loved ones were fed. Aunt B.'s a very practical woman.

In the last several months, the pattern has changed. She's still sending us off with food, but now she's throwing in dishes on which to serve it. And knickknacks. And furniture.

After our last visit three weeks ago, I left her house with a bowl of potato salad and a coffee table.

Mind you, Aunt B. makes excellent potato salad, and the coffee table's one of those really cool round blond formica jobs that exemplifies 1950s furniture, but this expanded generosity gives me a twinge.

My family doesn't have yard sales. Pack rats all, we have basements or attics or junk drawers so we can tuck all our stuff away and never see it again until it's time to palm it off on unsuspecting relatives. We would never sell our stuff to total strangers.

Aunt B. has an attic and a basement, which is good because after my grandmother died Aunt B. was the only one in the family with enough room to accommodate her mother's stuff.

Grandma had pack ratting down to a science. She even saved grease, in those little tin canisters that sit on the stove. Grandma raised her children during the Depression, when life was really tough and people saved everything because you never knew what you might need. She probably had grease left over from World War II in her basement.

My father -- Grandma's son and Aunt B.'s older brother -- spent more than 20 years in the Air Force. He has every piece of paper documenting every transfer from boot camp in World War II through his retirement in 1968.

I keep telling him he can throw them away, but he barks his name, rank and serial number at me and leaves the room.

We do not, as a tribe, collect things. We just never throw anything away.

While we were in the attic on that last visit, Aunt B. spotted several more treasures fit for distribution, everything from photo albums to old magazines to dining room suites.

She dug out a dust-encrusted box and asked my sister, "These are some of your grandmother's dishes. Do you want them?"

My sister, always a fast-thinker, replied that the coffee table would take up all the available room in the car.

But Sis will be back at Aunt B.'s for Thanksgiving and trust me, she'll be leaving with more than drumsticks and leftover pumpkin pie. Saying no to your dear departed grandmother's china is harder than it sounds. It was harder when Grandma was alive and was giving away all her stuff before going into the nursing home.

The pragmatic view, I suppose, is that Aunt B., now 70, knows she's getting older and doesn't want us to fight over who gets what when she's gone. Or she's planning on redecorating and is running out of room in the attic.

I realize none of us will live forever, though I prefer not to dwell on it, and every "heirloom" from Aunt B.'s attic brings that realization home a little more firmly.

But it's these remnants from which a family's heritage are woven. The pedal-powered Singer sewing machine now in my living room belonged to my grandmother, who inherited it from her mother. It's still packed with hundreds of mismatched buttons and half-filled bobbins my grandmother collected over a lifetime of sewing and mending and alterations. Every time I dust it, I think what a shame it is that I don't sew.

Maybe someday I'll learn.

~Peggy O'Farrell is a staff writer for the Southeast Missourian.