Heirloom from my Grandfather ~ 52 Ancestors #8

I am participating in this year's 52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks writing challenge from Amy Johnson Crow. Each week has an optional writing prompt and this week's writing prompt is Heirloom.

My maternal grandfather, Lowell Townsend Copeland, lived from 1900 to 1974. I wrote about him several years ago at My Grandfather, Toby Copeland.

He loved to travel and when he was a teenager, he spent several weeks traveling in Wyoming and Montana. I shared a series of photographs from these travels at the following posts:

Grandfather Out West
Grandfather Out West - Photos #2
Grandfather Out West - Photos #3

Sometime in the 1970s, my widowed grandmother sent some items to my mother to give to my brothers as a Christmas present.

Three very small porcelain dishes, a knife, stirrups, and a beaded case. The card with my grandmother's unique handwriting says:

To Margot
A few momentoes [sic]
of your Fathers I
thought your boys
might like - Love, Mother

Although my mother can't remember exactly when she received this, my brothers were likely not much older than ten-and-a-half, nine and seven-and-a-half. She wasn't about to give them a six inch knife!

However, she held on to these and passed them along to me several years ago when she moved out of the house I grew up in. Instead of becoming playthings, they are heirlooms from my grandfather's childhood and young adulthood.