White Dishes And Memory

White Dishes and Memory

Years ago while my friends were registering for their everyday dishes and fancy china, I bought myself eight place settings of unadorned white dinnerware. It was a practical purchase. At the time, eight place settings were enough to serve my parents, my sister’s family, and me.

Some time after I purchased the dinnerware, my mom began replacing her old dishes with the same pattern. I don’t remember if she liked my choice of dishes (our tastes were rarely similar) or if she, also practical, decided that her place settings plus mine would be enough to feed a larger, future version of our family at holiday time, should the need arise.

Either way, her white dishes together with mine could cover almost any dining possibility.

After my Mom’s passing, we slowly parsed out her things. Furniture and other favorite items went to my sister’s daughters, functional and sentimental pieces furnished my dad’s new apartment, and I received the dishes that match my own.

Now my kitchen cabinet holds enough white dishes to feed a small regiment. I don’t have a table large enough to host twenty-plus people at once—but I have the dishes, even if I don’t have the room. I stacked Mom’s inherited plates, bowls, cups, and saucers on top of my own so that they’ll be used—if not all at once, at least one or two at a time.

Now each time I open the cabinet for a cup or a salad plate, I’m reminded that she’s gone—and that I have stacks of memories yet unprocessed, just as I have stacks of dishes yet unused. Sometimes I’m still not sure what parts of my heart are my own and which are inherited from her. Our lives were as intermingled and impossible to cleanly delineate as these white dishes.

I don’t expect to use the dishes all at once. And I imagine, too, that I will long be uncovering and examining what I carry inside that was once my mother’s. I am, and will always be, her daughter. But I am God’s one-of-a-kind creation and my own woman as well. May he make something beautiful, in his time, of the dishes and of me.

I will give to each one a white stone, and on the stone will be engraved a new name that no one understands except the one who receives it.

Revelation 2:17