Your ring? Said the Piggy, I will.

Finally, we've started cleaning out my mother's house and making it ready for sale. I spent 24 hours there over the weekend, and came back with a carload of oddments and nostalgia, including (but by no means limited to):

• A shilling.
• The blue chenille bathrobe I took to college with me.
• My junior high school, high school and college yearbooks.
• A green glass vase, 5' tall.
• The Mar 3, 1980 cover of the New Yorker, framed, because my mother (rightly) thought it looked just like my college dorm common room.
• A cashmere hat, pale blue, that my mother bought new at a thrift shop.
• A koa wood box that I gave my mother for Christmas once, bought in the town I went to college in (I know this because the tag was in the box).
• An unopened package of 50 envelopes.
• The ticket stub from an inadvertently hysterical concert we attended in 1991, where the audience was instructed to "make the noise you need to make" to "raise the cone of power".
• Three flower arranging devices.
• An army green can of saddle soap, from when my father was in the Marine Corps, labeled

POISON
Do not use as food container

• My Stieff teddy bear, all four paws patched with new felt because the moths had once gotten to him and exposed his excelsior stuffing.
• The birthday cake plate of my youth, flat, Italian.
• A salad spinner, the twin of the one we already have, but not cracked.
• The Karinska book I once gave my mother.
• The gaudy yellow, red, blue and kelly green quilt that my mother and I made in 1975. It lived on my bed in my kelly green room, until my mother redecorated that room in more soothing shades of blue.
• My paternal uncle's French "verb wheel", from prep school?
• A small rake.
• An ancient green glass jar of fuller's earth dusting powder.
• A baseball cap from a Harvard-Yale game, emblazoned "Impale Yale". I've boxed it up to send it to my college boyfriend, who went to Harvard, and whose son now goes to Yale.
• The brass key fob from room 28 of the Hotel d'Albe in Fountainebleau.
• One of THE two copies of Fantastic Mr. Fox - which leads me to wonder, if there were two copies, why have I never read it?
• An autograph book, with signatures dated between 1899 and 1905. I've no idea whose it was. My great-grandmother, perhaps. Maybe I'll send it to the historical society in Athens.
• More index cards.
• Some sedum to tuck into my stone wall, and some bamboo to plant down at the way bottom of my garden (where it can ramble without prejudice). [Digging things out of the garden was not strictly necessary.]
• A jump rope.
• The tassel from my mortarboard.
• A baton (for conducting, not for baton twirling).
• A tidily folded bit of tissue paper, marked "my tooth is in here".

And this is only the tip of the iceberg.