As if in a tapestry, its threads entwined, Vicki and Bob Pickle live amid family treasures, hers and his, interwoven into theirs.

Her grandpa’s Victrola case, whose rescue from the cellar Vicki immortalized in “The Legacy,” a poem within one of her essays, both published in “The Sagarin Review: The St. Louis Jewish Literary Journal,” now stands in the Pickles’ living room. Bob’s mother’s table, angled and pedestal-like, holds a lamp and other accessories in the paneled dining room.

Certainly, the Pickles, of Ballwin, live with furniture, some of it refinished and made sturdy again by Bob. But the couple also resides with unvarnished history. Vicki’s parents, the late Sue and Allen Schulman, once lived in a mid-century modern home. “My mother had this wonderful style,” Vicki says.

Sue Schulman’s marble-topped, geometrically curvy coffee table more than occupies space in the Pickles’ den. Vicki has made it a focal point. “It ‘directs’ the rest of the room,” she says.

Moreover, to co-exist with family heirlooms, whether Grandpa Marshall Dubinsky’s phonograph case, now a curio cabinet, or Grandma Ida Dubinsky’s mirror, is to live daily with ever more deeply etched memories.

Vicki wrote in another poem, likewise published in a “Sagarin Review,” of “the images of Grandmother/fixing her hair in front/of the Chippendale mirror.” Inspired in part by the dozen or so years that Vicki and Bob’s daughter Sarah practiced on Grandma Anita Schulman’s piano, now in the family for four generations, Vicki wrote in the same poem of “ancestral whispers” woven through fabrics as if “photographs from the past.”

Whether she writes with her mother’s pens or at her own computer, Vicki sits most often at Grandpa Sam Schulman’s hand-carved desk. At Vicki and Bob’s, the cherry walnut desk is improbably, though quite comfortably, positioned in the dining room.

Reflecting on her childhood and the desk, Vicki has written: “On a chair carved with horses/the language of his youth/enters her heart.” The poem, titled “Her Grandfather’s Desk,” appeared in the Sagarin Review and in “First Harvest: Jewish Writing in St. Louis, 1991-1997.”

While Sarah Pickle completes her residency in family medicine in Philadelphia, sending her some of the family’s keepsakes remains impractical. But when younger sister Elyse, who works in communications and digital media at Fleishman-Hillard here moved recently to her first post-university apartment, not surprisingly she brought along several things from home, including a bench from her grandmother Sue, repurposed into a window seat.

In their personal and professional lives, Bob and Vicki see themselves as maximizers of potential. Married for 30 years, they belong to United Hebrew Congregation.

Now semi-retired, Bob was a teacher and counselor in the Rockwood School District  and head of school at the previous Wildwood Day School. He currently works as an academic tutor.

A former educator and editor-in-chief at St. Louis Homes & Lifestyles magazine, Vicki has had a multi-faceted career with positions including those in interior design. Presently she is a freelance writer.

Sometimes, the Pickles purchase new pieces for their home. On occasion, they buy antiques with no previous connection to their families. Still, virtually all pieces seem to acquire a story.

Vicki’s torchiere, or floor lamp that directs light upward, belonged to her maternal grandparents. “I can picture it in their home, what chair it sat by, sitting under it, looking at recipes with my grandma or reading,” she says.

Her daughters’ memories will likely be different: “They might think of Mom cooking dinner and walking into the front room to turn on the light,” Vicki says. “It will be their story about the lamp. I like knowing that.”

And what if the Pickle daughters decide to live mostly with their own acquisitions? The family history will still live on, preserved in their mother’s poetry and essays, written with their grandmother’s pen, at their great-grandfather’s desk.