The Lost Week, the Gained Lamp

What our material things can mean.

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This lamp and its accompanying groovy 1970s ashtrays make me feel at home.

I had plans for this week’s Flower Child, but the week had other plans for me. My elderly mother was in the hospital for over a week — while my sister scrambled to figure out where Mom would go when she was released, as she’d need more care than she could get at her assisted living.

After a crazy roller coaster of a week, we spent the weekend packing up Mom’s apartment to move her to a smaller unit in a memory care facility. That meant downsizing, which meant the orange mushroom lamp had to go.

If you watched Mad Men, you may know the lamp I’m talking about — though the one in Roger Sterling’s office was white. Imagine my surprise when I saw our mushroom lamp on the show — a lamp my parents had owned for decades but I’d never seen anywhere else. Turns out it’s the Artemide Nesso Table Lamp, designed in 1967 by Giancarlo Mattioli and Gruppo Architetti Urbanisti Citta Nuova.

Roger Sterling with his lamp. That’s a very white color palette!

While I’m not a connoisseur or buyer of Italian designer lamps, I appreciate my architect father’s love for them. But the mushroom lamp is much more to me than a beautiful lamp. It’s much more to me than a very Flower Child lamp. It also represents home. It represents my childhood. It represents a time of promise and hope — not only my youth, and a time when my parents were well and living a full life, but also a time when, though there was certainly turbulence, we weren’t filled with our current existential dread. Just looking at that lamp can cheer me up.

The mushroom lamp has been with my parents since the late 1960s or early ‘70s. It moved from our house in Urbana, Illinois, to my parents’ house in Potomac, Maryland, to their house in San Rafael, California, where they came to be with my sister and me. It made the cut when they downsized to a two-bedroom assisted living apartment, and then when Mom downsized to a one-bedroom after Father died. But now, it’s come home with me. My sister doesn’t share my Flower Child aesthetic, so I’m the grateful beneficiary of the remaining orange things that once filled our home — including the lamp.

Fuzzy photos of my parents in the early 1970s. Note the orange shag rug, sadly not among the remaining items. I wish I had a better photo of it; having been bought by an architect, it was the most beautiful orange shag rug I’ve ever seen. And the small orange lamp in the photo at the right? I have that one, too.

Christmas in a house with lots of orange; parents at left, sister with cat at right (is that a tiny bit of the mushroom lamp in the lower left?).

The mushroom lamp in its original habitat, looking kind of red in this fuzzy photo; late 1970s when I was in high school, sitting next to Father.

The lamp with my parents in their San Rafael house. She had just turned 80; he would soon turn 83.

The lamp in its new environment, cat-fort-adjacent. The wall hanging behind it also came from my parents and, like the lamp, is also Italian.

So although I didn’t have time for my usual Flower Child post this week, I leave you with this thought:

Material things may not matter in the end, but the things we bring along with us through our lives can still have meaning. Like the plate I wrote about a couple years ago, which has accompanied generations of my family to three continents and got me thinking about my origins. Like the Indian elephant-printed cloth that one of my best friends and her siblings gave me from their parents’ house after they sold it, a house where I had spent so many hours as a child. And, of course, like my beloved mushroom lamp.

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Do you have sentimental items you’ve kept in your home (or homes) through the years? I’d love to hear about them in the comments!