THE NEW DE YOUNG / Her mother's good taste lives on, thanks to museum's donor wall 

When I was a kid growing up in Southern California's San Fernando Valley in a tract house, across the street from a soon-to-disappear open field where we caught lizards in flip-top cigarette boxes, I didn't understand that my mother had taste. I looked around our living room and wondered why it didn't look like everyone else's in our middle-class neighborhood. Where were the matching divan and easy chair? Where were the Early American maple end tables? Where were the Hummels?

We had a simple, oval mahogany coffee table, a worn but elegant hand-me-down from a relative. My mother refinished it. She made her own lampshades and upholstered a quirky, overstuffed rocker with trim that made most visitors stop and say, "Hmm." Instead of shelves of bric-a-brac, she had one sage green, three-tiered candy dish my aunt had sent from Japan, on an upright secretary. Plus books. Poetry books, biographies, novels, zillions of children's books, mysteries and one I loved, a beautiful boxed volume on ikebana. There was a midnight-blue hardcover 1940s edition of Emily Post, which I pored over, convinced that I'd lead a life one day in which it was helpful to know that at sundown the household staff changed from gray and white uniforms to black ones with white aprons. I can still picture the dinner-party chapter that describes how you, the perfect guest, should behave when seated next to someone with whom you're no longer on speaking terms. (In case you want to know, you smile and agree to give the appearance of chatting by saying the timetables back and forth with each other, because you don't want to offend your hostess by sulking and refusing to make small talk.) At any rate, there were books on our shelves, real books and not the Reader's Digest condensed varieties.

During the holidays when the other neighborhood moms went wild with red and green and sparkle, my mother filled a low brass bowl with a mass of red camellias, harbinger of the closely massed blossoms today's society florists arrange. Instead of buying fruitcake in the shiny tins we pointed out to her in the store, she made her own the old-fashioned way. She soaked cheesecloth in brandy and wrapped it around the completed loaf to mellow. It was ambrosial. When we begged her, she'd create those awful, spray-on, snow-outlined reindeer and sleigh tableaux on our windows, but I know she thought they were tacky.

I thought we couldn't afford matching furniture or Hummel figurines, and that my mom was too tired to create those snow-scenes on the windows. But I grew up to realize that my mother had something better than money; she had taste. She painted and sketched and made clothes so beautiful that after her memorial service, one of my sister's friends wept as she told me about the elegance of the French seams my mother put inside a formal she'd sewn for her as a gift. Today, years after she's gone, my brother, sister and I have my mom's paintings on the walls of our homes.My mother's name -- Vauneta Cardwell Winthrop -- is on another wall, the donor wall at the new M.H. de Young Memorial Museum. My husband and I made a modest donation to put her there. I thought it was a way to honor her love for art, for museums and for the trips we'd made together to the de Young and the Legion of Honor, after she and my father moved to the Bay Area.Now, I know better. I think it's because I'm looking forward to bringing my grandchildren to this building, and telling them about their great-grandmother. About training and trusting an eye for beauty. About how little beauty has to do with means.

There are lots of names on the wall, more than 4,000. And I bet every one of them has a backstory -- somebody's mother, wife, father, teacher. People put their kids' names on the wall. Donors put their own names on the wall, as a way to say, "This is what I care about."

On my dresser, there's a small, intricately carved wooden box, lined with deep red felt, created for my mother by a wounded soldier she cared for as a nurse during World War II. It holds my night-on-the-town earrings and it's the prettiest heirloom I own. Well, up to now. Since the new de Young is a public institution, I think my mother and I own a piece of that, too. After all, her name is on the wall. As she always said to me, "Anything I have is yours, honey."