Spoon Collection

Student Collector

Shannon MeyerFollow

Date Collected

Fall 11-24-2018

Place item was collected

Murray Utah

Informant

Erica Meyer

Point of Discovery/Informant Bio

Erica Meyer is my mother. She was raised Moscow, Idaho and now lives in Murray, Utah with her husband Bruce Meyer. She was born in 1971. She is a school teacher like her mother and grandmother.

Context

I interviewed my mother in our kitchen in Salt Lake while I was visiting for thanksgiving. She was interviewed while she and her son were playing a game of Five Crowns. She told me this collection was wasn’t sure when it was started so we called my grandfather and he said that the collection was most likely started in the late 1950’s, we aren’t really sure. My great-grandmother was born in 1905, married sometime and became a widow in 1972. After she became a widow, she spent more of her time traveling and thus was able to collect more spoons. There are two forks in the collection both of which were given to her as gifts from family or friends as they traveled.

Text

These are the spoons that my great grandmother and mother collected.

Texture

My mother collects them for a few reasons, family connection and it’s a souvenir that won’t clutter up her house. Her grandmother would travel by herself and my mother sees the collection as a symbol of fearlessness, not going to let anything stop me. My great-grandmother wasn’t just sitting around waiting for her grandchildren to come visit. She was out doing things, and to my mother it was inspiring. My mother mostly collects spoons, she doesn’t like the forks. She also doesn’t polish the older spoons even through some are very tarnished because she views it as a way to tell age on the spoons. My mother likes to collect the majority herself, she will accept them as gifts but would rather have something else as a gift than a spoon for her collection. She likes to have a connection from the family to the place. She displays them by trying to balance them out, some old ones next to some new ones, tall ones next to small etc.

Course

English 2210

Instructor

Lynne S. McNeill

Semester and year

Fall 2018

Theme

G8: Objects with/of Customary Use

EAD Number

3.1.4.5

Recommended Citation

Meyer, Shannon, "Spoon Collection" (2018). USU Student Folklore Fieldwork. Paper 432.
https://digitalcommons.usu.edu/student_folklore_all/432