A genealogy search revealed a paternal line that ran through a Michael Peterman, immigrating to Philadelphia from Rotterdam in 1751 along with 486 other passengers aboard the ship Osgood in a horrific voyage including numerous deaths, then joining the 3rd Battalion of York in 1776 and deeded 150 acres, a plot later known as “Lovely Springs” located adjacent to a prisoner-of-war camp for British troops, which he farmed, and then signing his will in 1784 bestowing his widow Anna Maria a third of his estate unless she remarried (which she did), in which case she would receive only “a cow, a chest, a bed, and some pots and pans.”

Brutal times indeed. Family history, though, like old pots and pans, then generally fade into the mists of time. But sometimes events conspire to beckon one out of that contemporary stupor to remind us that we were not simply placed here as whole cloth – that each of us is a miracle of luck, often a product of great sacrifice and hardship, the net of innumerable contingent outcomes.

Sometimes circumstances force us to make a literal split-second decision about whether to retain tangible items that represent various life markers.

Perhaps the hand had been forced by one of those Florida hurricanes that gave homeowners virtually minutes to decide what to save. Or take the real-time (written 1/12/25) raging conflagration in southern California. Here’s how a WSJ journalist described the loss of his own mother’s home near the El Medio bluffs: “she lost her entire life, every painting, every book, every photo of my late father, every scrap that proves she has had a life.”

Our focus discussion piece is a look at the drama of one woman’s “pots and pans” in The Skillet – the one that was handed down from her great-great grandmother. It’s not so much about the skillet, mind you, as the conversation about what matters. How do we measure up against our forebears, she wondered, who had packed up everything: the skillet, the massive Dutch oven, and a one-gallon soup pot, and a tiny baby, a girl, her first, her only, the author’s great-grandmother?

What items would you hold on to and what compelling conversations might thereby be evoked?