I may not have inherited my grandfather’s clock—in fact, I am not sure my grandfather even had a clock—but I do have a wealth of inherited memories tied up in objects, objects that, like those sudden nostalgic scents or songs, sweep us away to our past. I cannot go into my kitchen, for example, without being in the presence of Reynalda.

An early friend in Santa Fe, she sat with me for hours at the State Archives helping me translate documents from the Archdiocese of Santa Fe. I was fascinated by New Mexico church inventories, page after page listing what was in the churches as early as the 1700s. As Reynalda and I cranked through the roles of microfilm, I would wonder, What became of that ivory crucifix or those tin lanterns? As a result of our time together, I have a bizarre Spanish vocabulary that often surprises native speakers—terciopelo, vinagrera, fanega, naveta, petaca (velvet, cruets for consecrated wine and water, about 1.6 bushels, incense boat, and leather chest)—to name a few such words that would be worthy of any Spanish trivia game and that give me the air of having been taught by a cloistered nun.

Besides giving me an 18th-century Spanish vocabulary, Reynalda sold me, for a song, a pie cupboard that had been made in her native town of Galisteo. She did this on the excuse of moving into a smaller house—“downsizing” perhaps being our current cultural equivalent of potlatching or dowry. The cupboard bore the unmistakable scars of a long, hard life: many, many layers of paint and a hole eaten right through the tin by a determined rodent.

While the cupboard may have come cheap, in the tradeoff one makes between nostalgia and practicality, I have spent thousands incorporating it into my kitchen. My kitchen is, in itself, an exercise in going backwards in time—something few sensible remodelers would see as an intelligent goal. Out went the laminate cabinets and in went the old pie cupboard in my perverse pursuit of the past.

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