I was nine when my maternal grandmother died. Her husband had passed a couple of years earlier, so after her funeral, we gathered with my mom’s two siblings to divvy up their stuff. I was the youngest cousin and therefore had the last pick, but it wouldn’t have mattered. No one else was interested in the things my preadolescent eyes saw as treasures. Among the items I persuaded my parents to load into our rented minivan and haul 10 hours back to Indiana from Pennsylvania: Grammy’s costume jewelry, her souvenir spoon collection, and a taxidermy mountain goat head.

I still can’t believe my mom and dad let me take Snowy. I later learned that Grampop had shot the shaggy white bovine on a hunting trip to British Columbia, but all I knew at the time was that petting Snowy was the first thing I did every time we visited. My parents must have been swept up in the emotion of the moment, but the sentiment didn’t last. After a few years of Snowy taking up valuable storage space, I had to beg my other grandma to take him in. When I finally bought my own home in Colorado in 2017, Snowy made the trip in a U-Haul, wedged between hand-me-down furniture.

5280 February 2025
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Those memories surfaced as I worked with photographer Kaylinn Gilstrap on “Jewelry, Hats, and Passport Stamps: A Portrait of Great-Grandma Zita.” In 2019, Gilstrap began documenting her great-grandmother Zita’s possessions at the family’s southeastern Colorado ranch. The resulting collection of images—of Zita’s world-travel mementos, high-fashion accessories, and the rural landscape today—are paired with historical snapshots and tales about Zita to create a vibrant portrait of a woman who refused to be defined by her small-town environs.

The project is an intimate personal history of Gilstrap’s family. But it also made me think about the inheritance that nine-year-old me fought so hard to keep. One of Grammy’s blue faux stone brooches became a hair comb I wore on my wedding day. My family regularly uses her tiny spoons emblazoned with travel destinations to scoop cheese and jam at our dinner table; we laugh thinking about my teetotaler grandparents walking the Las Vegas Strip and wonder if they saw the same sites we did on a recent trip to Puerto Rico. And Snowy? He now presides over our basement rec room, giving me a reason to tell mildly alarmed visitors about Grampop—and continuing to keep his memory alive.