The great table collapse of ’07 destroyed nearly all of my dishes, and most of what remained (after the mover destruction of ’03) of my original set of china. I really grieved this loss because beautiful dishes are symbolic for me. It’s what I have to offer the people I love. They are tools I use to create a life of beauty and grace as I nurture everyone who comes in my circle. I’m a firm believer in using what you love and not postponing the best because of the fear of wear and tear. I pull out china whenever I feel in the need of a pick me up. Whenever I make a really good meal I want to set off with importance. Whenever a guest is over and I want to make them feel special.
My mother-in-law Sally took pity on me when I lost my dishes and gave me the set her mother left when she died. While I normally have an irrational bias against anything gold, I just adore these dishes. The quality is outrageous. I don’t think you could get dishes like these in the states for love or money, and while I’m not normally a sentimental person, I treasure that Jared’s grandmother, a woman I knew and loved, carried these back from Germany herself.
The porcelain is so fine it’s translucent, and yet I’m never afraid to handle them. Which, now that I think of it, reminds me of Jared’s grandmother. Grams was a lovely, tiny, bird thin woman, always with a wiglet of curls over her pinned up hair and covered in layers of sweatshirts to try to stay warm. You’d never know to look at her what a mighty force she was in the lives of her family – raising her brothers and sisters as a teenager during the depression, earning food by working as a laborer at a turnip farm, teaching her family the gospel and keeping generations of family tightly knit together. To this day Sally and her siblings and generations of cousins go to Utah every summer for a family reunion with the children and grandchildren of those siblings Grams helped raise.
I’ve never been one to cherish the story behind an object before. I think that motherhood is injecting life into my robot heart.
motherhood can bring out the sentimentalist in all of us. Next thing you know you'll be writing Hallmark cards!