While canning recently I reached for a spoon to scrape out
the pot. It was just an ordinary serving spoon, but it occurred to me that this
particular spoon had been with me since I was 17 years old and a new bride. It
was part of a stainless service for 12, a wedding gift. The rest of the set has
long since undergone that diaspora that most flatware seems to suffer, but this
one spoon is still in my kitchen drawer. It traveled to a pre-World War II
apartment with me, to my first little log cabin house on the banks of the
Occoquan River in Virginia, to an apartment on the banks of another river, the
Ohio this time, and finally here to the house I built with my first husband.
It’s just a spoon, I know. But it symbolizes the passages of
my life from a teenager to young mother, to country woman and grandmother. It
has served countless dishes of applesauce, green beans, potatoes, ice cream and
who knows what else. It has jostled in the drawer with the paprika orange and
avocado green utensils of the 70’s, the Teflon spatulas and wooden spoons of
the 80’s and finally with the vintage kitchen tools I now favor. Somehow I
overlooked this one spoon when I got rid of the stainless in favor of the
silverplate flatware and serving spoons I inherited from my mother. It nestled
in the back of the drawer, forgotten until now.
That got me to thinking about other humble things have been
with me over the years. It seems that
the majority of these “lifers” reside in my kitchen. The large and bulbous orange-red
A wood-covered cookbook called Recipes from Old NewEngland was another wedding gift, given to me by a lady whose children I
had babysat for. Jan Lawless, her name was, a quiet, kind lady who might be
astonished to know that her gift taught me to make biscuits, pie crust and coup
beans. I still pull it out in winter months to refresh my pie-crust-making
memory after a summer of little baking. My father gave me the 10-inch cast iron
skillet I use almost daily; it is not a name brand or a sought-after antique,
just a serviceable, sturdy and versatile pan that cooks eggs dependably and
makes the best cornbread crust.
I am sure there are many more of these humble things lurking
in my cabinets and resting on my shelves. They hold the story of my life, in a
way, or at least my adventures in cooking as I progressed from opening cans to
canning, from buying bread to baking it and from timid to confident cook. Look
around your kitchen. My bet is you have your own history bearers, waiting for
you to look at them and remember the stories and the people connected with
their presence in your life. Things are after all only things, but they are the
key to unlocking and savoring the many memories of our life’s journey.
Copyright Susanna Holstein. All rights reserved. No Republication or Redistribution Allowed without attribution to Susanna Holstein.
The story of your silverware could have been my story, my silverware drawer has seen all the changes yours has.
ReplyDeleteI still have just a few things that came as wedding presents or were bought early in my married life. The oldest is a set of fish knives and forks that were part of conferencing cutlery given as a wedding present to my parents. The rest of it is gone but mum still had these in a drawer when I cleared her house, I remember the whole canteen being in the sideboard when I was a child.
ReplyDeleteI still have my grandmother's aqua blue colander. My mom gladly fobbed it off on me when I married so many years ago. It is a hideous weird blue, but the spaghetti I strained through it the other night was scrumptious. Things like this often outlast the women who use them.
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