Precious

Isn’t it funny, our proclivity to keep our most precious things locked away?

I have a set of dishes, dwindling now, that my husband had made by a friend a few years after we were married, commissioned to match the platter my mother gave us just hours before she learned her mother had died on our wedding day.

(Yes, it's ok to need to read that line again. I've been trying to write it for sixteen years, and it still doesn't scan. Consider this a surrender to imperfection.)

I had been coveting the platter—broad with upturned sides like a giant pasta bowl, brown and earthy green with a leafless maple tree stretching across its center—for all the weeks leading up to our wedding. It sat in the center of the tiny country store in my hometown, proud on a pedestal surrounded by pitchers, vases, coffee mugs, all destined to be a last minute gift at a wedding, a birthday, maybe an almost-forgotten anniversary, and I dropped shameless hints to anyone who was listening about how much I loved it. And then, the week before my wedding—the week my childhood friend Jenn was married—the platter disappeared, and I was happy for Jenn, that she would have something so lovely, and sad for me that I hadn’t bought it for myself when I had the chance. And then I let it go.

A few days later, the morning of our wedding, when my not-yet-husband and I were waking up to make coffee and write our vows, in our last moments of innocence before we knew not what storm, my sister arrived to do her sister-of-the bride duty—to make sure we ate at least one meal that day—with a fruit salad in her arms and her not-usually-shy 4-year old wrapped around her knees.

And as she walked down the path from car to cabin, I looked at the spread of her arms and realized there was only one dish in town that big, and knew the platter was coming home.

It turned out my mother had bought us the platter, relieved, I’m sure, that I took the guesswork out of her gifting.

And we ate cantaloup, then, and grapes and bright red strawberries, and we spoke the ingredients for a good marriage, raw and spare—romance; adventure; spontaneity; stability; trust—and jotted them down on the rough brown paper of an empty grocery bag, and then wove them more gently into the words we would speak to each other in a few short hours—I will bring you coffee in bed, and flowers in the afternoon; I will seek wild adventure, and delight in the comfort of a warm kitchen; I will hold you when you cry—and wrote them onto a set of note cards I had tucked in a box, blank on the inside, purple irises and blue bell-flowers on the front. And we ate raspberries and tart grapefruit, all the pith peeled carefully away.

And after we wrote and ate and drank our coffee, we quick turned our outdoor kitchen into a woodland wedding altar, and set off to primp and prepare for the day ahead. But in the driveway of my childhood home we met my mother racing out, urgency in her eyes, they can’t find my mother on her lips, and she was going to help look. Unsettling, yes, but let’s not panic, not yet, and then David and I kissed a sweet goodbye, and went to become beautiful for each other, and for all these people who had gathered to wish us well.

But I couldn’t go upstairs to change, not yet, waiting as I was for the phone to ring, for some explanation, for my grandmother, my matron of honor as it were, to be found. And then, I need Steve croaked my motherless mother from the other end of the receiver, and I handed him the phone, and needed no more explanation. I sat, then, on the living room floor and soaked Kottie’s tee shirt, thin and white, with my grief and astonishment while she held me, while I keened—my grandmother, whisper thin, steady, brilliant, gone—and when Steve was done with the phone, I made a phone call of my own—I need David­—without explaining, and they thought he was late, so he drove up the two miles of rutted gravel in a hurry, too fast on the bad corner, I'm sure, and I fell into his arms, then, and he held me while I cried.

And he held me while we decided what to do—me, my not-yet-husband, my newly orphaned mother, my father in quiet support on the green back lawn—what to do with all these people, come here to celebrate us and this thing called love.

And we decided there was nothing else to do but meld wedding and wake and speak our vows, break bread and eat a roasted pig and the cake my sister made, and light a giant bonfire to celebrate—together—a life fully-lived, a marriage just starting out, the impossibility of their joining.

And having decided, we did the thing, and it was beautiful, in its way, and when it was over the platter with the tree across its center made it whole from Vermont to Oregon in my suitcase, and today it sits next to the toaster on my blue kitchen countertop, filled with bread, one chip of unglazed ceramic knocked out of the base by a careless child climbing to find a mug for cocoa.

But years before we needed enough bread for a family of four, my husband called the potter, asked her to make us a set of tree dishes—eight each of dinner plates, soup bowls, coffee mugs. No one dared mail them across the country, so we found a friend driving, paid for some of her gas to ensure safe delivery, and the dishes made their way to us wrapped in newspaper, filling a cardboard box in the back of a Subaru wagon. And I said to David, as I unpacked the dishes—delicate and thin for all their earthiness—“We’re going to eat off these, every day, not lock them up for special occasions. What would be the point of that?”

And now there is one bowl left, three mugs that don’t leak. About half of the plates are intact still, though two have streaks of epoxy fusing them whole, and we eat off of them, most every day.

Just this morning I carried a cup of tea through the woods, the rising sun shining through a chink in the rim of the mug.