The house in Chicago where I grew up was built for my maternal Grandparents. They ordered it from a selection of plans offered by the builders of a new subdivision on the prairie outskirts of the city. Building the house took a year. Begun in 1895, the year my mother was born and finished in 1896. After its completion, my grandparents lost no time moving into it with their eight children. My mother, the youngest and last child, was a year old. She knew no other home until she married at age twenty four. Houses built back then had many nooks and crannies, making them far more interesting than the houses of today with their efficient, sterile, box-like rooms. As it turned out, a very interesting cranny was found in that old Chicago house when it was about fifty years old.

My grandparents died and left the house to my mother and her siblings. My parents bought it from them and moved into it with their own five children. The house was about forty years old then.

The mystery to me is that for all the years my mother lived there before she married and then after she returned with her own family, she never knew about the hidden cranny. Our family had been living in the house for about nine years when my mother stumbled upon it.

After she found it, Mother contacted her siblings and asked what they knew about the space but none had ever known of its existence. No one knew if their parents meant it to be a secret place or if they just happened to use it at times when they were alone in the house and didn’t think it important enough to mention. They had been dead for many years by the time the cranny was discovered so their intent remains a mystery.

Almost all houses of that era had a built-in china cupboard. Our house had a long, dark, hall connecting the kitchen to the dining room. Our china cupboard, located at the end of the hall nearest to the dining room, was extra wide. The lower part had three deep drawers. The bottom of the lowest drawer sat at the top of the eight inch high baseboard. Above the drawers were shelves behind glass doors.

The cupboard was not a fine piece of furniture with amenities like drawer guides. When the weather was damp, as it was most of the time in Chicago, the wooden drawers would swell and stick. Opening one meant inching it out by yanking first one side then the other side until it extended far enough to reach in and remove the item needed. During spring cleaning, mother would worry those heavy drawers out as far as she could without removing them because they were too clumsy and heavy for her to replace.

One spring cleaning day the worst happened. Mother was on her knees pulling at the bottom drawer with all of her strength when it came free. My nimble little mother managed to scramble out of the way just before the heavy thing whomped onto the floor. Thoroughly frustrated she glared at the space where she would have to replace the drawer. To her surprise, there was a big space behind the baseboard from where the bottom of the drawer had been to the floor and it wasn’t empty. It was stuffed with letters.

When I came home from high school that day I found her sitting cross-legged in the hall with those letters strewn all around her. She had been happily reading and sorting them according to the senders all afternoon. I was so excited over the find that I got down on my hands and knees and began to paw through the letters that were still in the space.  Mother had already removed most of the ones in the front so I was digging in the back. In a far corner I felt cloth wrapped around a hard object. “I found something.” I yelled and wiggled my fingers until I had a good hold on whatever it was. I pulled the bundle out and found the wrapping was actually a dark blue silver-cloth bag.

Mother and I worked together excitedly untying the cord that held the bag shut. Inside we found two objects each in its own silver-cloth bag. By this time their shapes gave Mother a clue as to what they were and before we had even untied the bags she let out a wondrous, “ Oh my goodness!”. What we pulled out of each bag was a gold lined silver goblet. Mother cradled them in her hands and said in soft reverence, “So this is where they have been.”

I didn’t know what they were so Mother explained to me that years before, our church had bowed to the cause of making communion sanitary by changing from the common communion cup to trays that held tiny individual wine glasses. I had grown up as a member of that church and never knew anything but those trays.

My mother was a member of the Ladies Aid Society. The members knew the goblets had been put away for safe keeping at the time the switch to the trays was made but where? Every church spring cleaning for years they searched for the goblets. They never found them.

When Mother and I found the goblets, she was almost certain she knew why they were hidden in the cranny. The church was never well locked so anything of value could easily be stolen. My Grandfather had been a deacon of the church. It held Communion services only twice a year. Mother believed that my grandfather kept the goblets safe at home for the long months between Communion services in that cranny under the drawer. She also believed that was the reason why no one but my grandparents knew about the cranny. The letters were there simply because it was a good place to keep them for sentimental reasons.

After the switch to trays, other members of the church must have known my grandfather had the goblets but as they weren’t needed the members forgot about them. Years passed. My grandparents died and so did all the other members of their generation. There was no one left to know who had put the goblets away and so as the Ladies Aid Society looked for them spring cleaning after spring cleaning they lay safely under the bottom drawer of our china cupboard.

As soon as she knew what we had found, mother jumped from under the letters that covered her, ran to the phone, called the president of the Ladies Aid Society,  announced the find and made arrangements to return the goblets to the church.

I can still remember my mother at the kitchen sink polishing those blessed vessels until they shined like new. That was sixty years ago. I have no idea what the church did with the goblets after mother returned them. I am not even sure that the church still exists. I only know that one day during spring cleaning, mother found a treasure and I was there to share the find.

What happened to the letters? Mother returned some to their writers and burned those she couldn’t identify. Was the cranny ever used again? I don’t know. Do the present occupants of the house know about the cranny? I don’t know that either. Sometimes it is nice to keep little mysteries as mysteries.