LUCY BURDETTE: It's always a happy day for me when Barbara Ross's next Maine mystery comes out. Sadly, I've already read SHUCKED APART. But I highly recommend the series to you, and know you'll enjoy her blog post today too. Welcome Barb!
BARBARA ROSS: Shucked Apart, the ninth Maine Clambake Mystery, is about oyster farming on the Damariscotta River. I loved doing the research, especially the part that started with a Damariscotta River Cruise, which takes you on a tour of the beautiful river, where you can see eagles, seals and lobster pots, and several oyster farms. On the trip they offer oysters from each farm and explain the difference in growing methods and taste. I recommend the tour to anyone who finds themselves in mid-coast Maine in the summer.
The subject of oysters brought me naturally to the subject of my grandmother’s oyster plates. It brought me there naturally because the plates were under my coffee table, which had also been hers, staring me in the face.
I first remember the coffee table, with the plates on its bottom shelf visible through the glass top, at my grandparents' house in Watermill, Long Island. That house was built in 1954 and following a tradition in our family, once the furniture was placed in the house it was never moved again. Sometimes, during my grandparents’ frequent cocktail parties, the crab you see in the corner of the photo above was on top of the coffee table filled with peanuts, which my brother and I found very exciting.
When my grandparents died the coffee table, plates, crab, and lobster-on-a-shell went to my parents’ sunporch in Dallas, Pennsylvania, where my kids and my niece and nephew grew up seeing them. When my parents downsized, the table ended up in their smaller home’s basement, as did the oyster plates, packed in a box. When it came time to empty that house, I grabbed them both. Now they’re at my house in Portland, Maine, where we clear them off that bottom shelf whenever my toddler granddaughters come to visit.
Thinking about the oyster plates I wondered: Do we keep things because they have meaning, or do they have meaning because we keep them?
The only plate I’ve done any research about this this one.
The design was specifically commissioned by Lucy Hayes, the wife of President Rutherford B. Hayes and made by Limoges for his inauguration in 1877. And if my plate said that on the back, it would be worth, according to Christies, $8,000 to $12,000. Surprise, surprise, it doesn’t say that on the back. The design was very popular and offered to the public, so my plate is probably worth more like $8.00 to $12.00.
I don’t know if that plate was in the family from 1877 onwards. It is plausible. My grandmother’s family were famous cabinetmakers in New York City. They made the chairs for the US House of Representatives in 1857, and later collaborated with the architects McKim, Mead and White, and with Louis Comfort Tiffany. In the next generation, they were among the founders of interior design as an industry. We have a lots of their stuff around, though I often suspect most of we have was rejected from paying commissions.
Or, it could equally plausibly be that one of my grandmother’s friends spotted the plate at a yard sale in the 1950s and bought it for her. You know how it is when it gets around that you’re collecting something.
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| Barbara's grandmother |
Whichever it is, the value to me is that the plates have been around all my life and remind me of happy times and people I loved. And now I’m imprinting them on a new generation.
Readers: What do you think? Do we keep things because they have meaning, or do they have meaning because we keep them? Is there something you treasure, even if it has value only to you? Tell us about it.
About Shucked Apart
The Snowden Family Clambake Company has a beloved reputation in Busman’s Harbor, Maine. Almost as famous is the sleuthing ability of proprietor Julia Snowden, which is why an oyster farmer seeks her out when she’s in trouble.
When Andie Greatorex is robbed of two buckets of oyster seed worth $35,000, she wonders if somebody’s trying to mussel her out of business. Could it be a rival oyster farmer, a steamed former employee, or a snooty summer resident who objects to her unsightly oyster cages floating on the beautiful Damariscotta River? There’s also a lobsterman who’s worried the farm’s expanding lease will encroach on his territory and Andie’s ex-partner, who may come to regret their split. Before Julia can make much headway in the investigation, Andie turns up dead, stabbed by a shucking knife. Now it’s up to Julia to set a trap for a cold and clammy killer . . .
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About Barb
Barbara Ross is the author of the Maine Clambake Mysteries and the Jane Darrowfield Mysteries. Her books have been nominated for multiple Agatha Awards for Best Contemporary Novel and have won the Maine Literary Award for Crime Fiction. She lives in Portland, Maine. Readers can visit her website at www.maineclambakemysteries.com
