In MY dictionary, if you looked up the meaning of "bittersweet" there would have to be a picture of my favorite pretty plates alongside.
Let me get the "bitter" out of the way first.
Although I'm happily using these vintage plates for everyday now, it is because I have come to a somewhat sad conclusion: I'm not going to outlast these dishes. They will be the last set I buy, the last set I will use. For a person who has "changed out" dish patterns all her married life, this is a little bittersweet.
But I have a bigger number of this pattern than I ever dreamed possible, and that is very sweet. It is a number bigger than can break in a routine course of use, and I just don't expect anything but the routine here. I'm not going to give them away, because I love them. And I'm not looking for, only hoping against, any act of God or "downfall" in the kitchen that would ruin any significant number of them.
In fact, I've always thought it was a special act of God who brought them to me in the first place. And NO, I'm not being dramatic.
The pattern IS one of the first that I truly enjoyed, actually, in my married life. The problem was it was just one single dish I found, at a flea market, for one thin dime. Oh, that I could have found more, I would have paid their price and brought them home decades ago, as a young mom and wife, trying in earnest to make her house a home.
For about a decade, I never saw another one like it. It must be its gorgeousness, I thought, that made this so. Pretty in pink and blue, I was covetous of more, seeking the pattern out evermore.
Alas, not to be, or so it seemed. I had found it in Colorado, where we lived for fourteen years, the last few in a financial and spiritual downturn for our little family. In crisis, we left, to work and save in California, where our families were. The plan was to eventually move into an also dispirited farmhouse in Wisconsin, one that had known thirty years of abandonment and revealed it openly, no matter how lovely its surroundings were, and even in its very yearning heartbeat.
It still wanted a family. We earnestly wanted a home. When we finally arrived in 1988, we joined together tentatively. "Sterbuck Farm" justifiably
wondered about what we were made of. It had been rejected countless times. Its story, we learned, was one of many "leavings" and in truth, from the moment we pulled in with the moving van, we considered doing so ourselves. The dream of it had been so romantic an adventure, its reality disappointed as mostly daunting and fearsome. It would wait us out, and we could do nothing but try to see it through.
And then the plate turned up, in its very soil, that very first spring. We were planting a garden, and up it came with a shovel, whole and perfect.
Can you blame us for the significance we saw in the pattern that emerged from the earth? It seemed to say, "Don't give up, don't feel dispirited. You are meant to be here. You are meant to give it the good, more cheerful try."
We needed to hear that. We needed to pick up the inspired pace. We needed to quit with the dejection and look up, look around. The farmhouse was habitable, and sound. It sat center of a work-of-art landscape that only God could be the signer of. The folks in our "neighborhood" were friendly and had reached out to us, and our little family had each other. We had to see the positive, and this THING, this physical item that I had searched far and wide for, in places much more likely and appropriate, had emerged from the ground in the middle of our "nowhere."
So it spoke to us all. We definitely perked up that day, knowing the "message" was something worth sustaining.
Our new neck-of-the-woods proved to be a region of the country where "my" dish pattern had obviously, in a previous era, been very popular. One shop keeper said he thought pieces were given away in oatmeal boxes, with others available for purchase either on store shelves or by order. In the late eighties, I started finding pieces everywhere, reasonably priced. Still perfect, still beautiful, to my eye and heart, so I picked up every one I came across. Close to our 25th wedding anniversary, I found a whole box of them complete with two platters and a creamer and sugar, vegetable servers, and much more. For a time, I stopped buying them, thinking what I'd accumulated we rarely used, and that we might never, really.
Craziness.
Why not start using them? I had said I should, and finally I did, for special occasions. Then a funny thing happened. Just like I hoped they would, they put me back in time. They put me back to the days of Sunday dinners and matronly mothers or grandmothers serving them up, of warm, steamy kitchens with aromas flowing out-of-doors, like the Johnny Cash lyrics (Sunday Morning Coming Down)"I walked across the street and caught the Sunday smell of someone frying chicken...and Lord, it took me back to something that I'd lost."
Ah, YES. Something many of us have lost...that Sunday dinner feeling, or of any lovingly prepared meal, capable of uniting families and sustaining not just bodies but souls, fit for memorializing a "feeling" unto the ages.
In her long-beloved series Laura Ingalls Wilder did this memorializing like no one else. When I was growing up in the sixties in Southern California, her "meal descriptions" transported me to another place and time, so that somehow, I wanted to capture those times and make them my own. It helped that my own mother had a "Laura" mindset about good meals around a family table, and between all such examples another kitchen nurturer was born. No. Modern Day. Apologies for loving the kitchen!!
I can't recall the plates my mother used, and I don't know that Laura's would have been quite this decorative. But I think both would have appreciated them as gems. I think both would have admired their pretty appeal, and that they were easily enough obtained so that they could serve for everyday, and yet suffice for special, too. I think both would have embraced, as I have, the gentle knife and fork lines that have lovingly scarred my plates. These creases, like the lines on a face, represent love forward, love accepted eagerly and love remembered. And no, I'm not being dramatic!
A plate is just a "thing", it's true. At the shop I owned for many years, I used many sets for serving, for selling, for decorating, for bringing home and using. My customers were as guilty as I was of loving pretty dishes; even the men noted and appreciated them. So it is something of a mystery to me that I am sure now
This is the one that makes me feel most like Laura, and honors most the homey legacy my mother also left behind. It's the one my kids know is nearest and dearest to my heart. And it is already the only one that my grandchildren have known in this household.
It is the one that reminds me a past I never lived, and it is the one I will take to my grave. Crushed, and mingled with my ashes. And yes, I AM being dramatic.
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