Dishes, Dishes
Dishes. I have dishes. It’s amazing the variety of dishes a couple can collect in 50 years of marriage while raising three kids. We have three sets of China. We bought the Wedgewood piece by piece on every trip I took to London. We were gifted one set of China for our wedding and inherited a third. Then we come to daily use dishes. The Pfaltzgraff plates cups and dishes, were Christmas presents in the early marriage years. They got retired at some point when they simply became too heavy or to paise or too chipped. There’s a semi-set of oven safe plates, dishes and cups from Anchor Hocking in the pantry, trimmed in gold. And there’s the daily use plates I now enjoy from Correlle.
We have an equally large collection of serving platters, salad dishes, pitchers, gravy boats, and dessert dishes. They’re all in the pie safe. And cups. We have cups of every description. I wish I knew more about how all this stuff came into the house. Some were bought but others probably came when relatives passed away. All that is lost to memory now. That’s too bad. I do have a binder my wife kept with the provenance of some pitchers and old coffee pots. I wish I’d have known she was doing it. I would have contributed and done a little more to pull it together. I bet if I invited her girlfriends over, they could tell me a lot about where some of these things came from, being as they were most likely some of her shopping partners.
For the moment, I think I’ll just enjoy pulling it all down. Tallying it up. Sorting it. And getting ready to do something with it. Doesn’t really seem fair to leave all that to the kids to handle after I’m gone. They can have what they want right this minute. Why wait? But that sort of stuff is pretty ubiquitous in every household and how many things can you keep around to remember someone? And when you do keep it around and then forget who owned it, then what’s that? Because I know lots of this came from my late wife’s mother and grandmother and I know some of it but not all of it. And what do I do with it? Who gets it? What wants it? And I think this is how we all die. Bit by bit. Until the day comes when there’s no one left who really cares. And nothing you’ve touched or done matters.