Names of the Flowers: Ruby Hemenway's Redemption of History, The

Frontiers, 2004 by Hoberman, Michael

Ruby Hemenway's representation of objects, her infusion of meaning into ordinary things, is an act of redemption. It follows, of course, that if the great events of history are dignified by the presence in their midst of tablecloths and sanders, so too are objects such as these rendered more meaningful, in her eyes, by their participation in the larger weave of world events. But the small is not made to serve the large, as some diminutive sidelight whose only purpose is to cast light on or magnify "true" greatness. Instead, small objects and the memories that ennoble them are rendered larger by Hemenway within the overall equation. Objects don't give way to concepts here but bring about the opposite effect. In her column "Old Buttons Were Something Special," she instructs readers: "Take a really good look [at old buttons] and ask yourselves all the questions that rise about them. You will find you are delving into art, history, geography, commerce, legends and other things." The remainder of the column tracks the story of one "very old brass button, plain and smooth with a good solid shank that was worn on great-grandfather's overcoat."16 If geography and history are important elements of the story, it is only by happenstance; the writer neither speaks directly about them nor implies any particular lesson. The button-talisman or not-is the object of her interest because it has seen the world.

Great-grandfather's old brass button starts on its journey in the early 1800s in the guise of an old kettle, traveling as one of a few of its owner s precious furnishings to a new home in the wilderness. As years pass, the brass kettle, now leaky and unmendable, is "pounded . . . into a shape that fit[s] the peddler's case." The peddler totes the flattened, former kettle to a town where he has it melted down, "made into kettles again, buttons or some other needed articles to outfit another set of peddlars." Eventually, it makes its appearance on the overcoat, having traveled the nation's highways and backroads and decades of history, its stature increasing over time and space, and culminating in a legacy that all but guarantees its continued value: "To my oldest son, my set of four brass buttons."17 Interestingly, the brass button seems to have survived not only because of its solidity, but also because of its pliability, its ability to adapt to change, to serve one generation on the hearth, the next on a coat front, and the third as a memento. Hemenway's privileging of such an object is especially significant because it suggests that her vision of history is far from a static one. Like the past that it represents, the object is dynamic and multifaceted in its composition. Its exposure to history, moreover, has brought about its enhanced and regenerative stature within the world of objects, as well as its increased symbolic value.

A similar process attends the New England stone wall from which the column "Everybody Had Their Stone Wall"18 takes its name. Such walls represent more than Yankee stick-to-itiveness. As the writer reminds us, the stone wall's presence in rural New England forests is a reminder of the constancy of change and the persistence of objects through change: "When we see miles and miles of old stone walls that border the woods roads . . . many things are brought to mind. Not only was all that land inside the stone walls open farm land, but those walls were a specialized form of labor that not every farmer was skilled in." The wall whose "meaning" we might be tempted to oversimplify is rendered more complex. It's not just a pile of rocks that farmers pulled out of the ground to make plowing possible. A stone wall is a composite object built from several types of stones and meant to serve several practical purposes. History emerges from such scrutiny not as an abstraction but as an entity whose primary characteristic is its inherent complexity and susceptibility to being out-lasted by ordinary things.