Who gets stuck with the dishes?
Do you want these gifts from the past?
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My parents have my great aunt Marjorie’s dishes.
There’s some china. There’s some silverware.
None of it is dishwasher safe.
None of it ever gets used.
These dishes take up a lot of space in a cabinet.
The cabinet takes up a lot of space in a room.
If these dishes have a story, neither myself, nor my sister knows it.
Someone, either her, or myself, are going to end up with the dishes.
After that?
One of our children will end up with the dishes.
What will we do with them?
Why do we keep them?
Is there anyone out there who collects bone China who can tell me how this stuff is important?
We all have gifts from the past. Whether it’s a degree we specialized in but didn’t use in our lives or a skill that we acquired that’s no longer necessary, we can be haunted by these gifts from our former selves.
What’s the ‘old bone China’ in your life?
Are you carting it around hoping to use it someday?
What would happen if you left it behind somewhere?
Yup my parents have some too. My brother recently saw some of the same pattern in a store in the UK, and learned it’s quite valuable. But, yes…. For what? Sell it!
What would happen if I left the china, or the “china”, behind somewhere? As someone who loves beauty, and history, particularly social history and the history of the ordinary and domestic, and who often, for a variety of reasons, sees things as people, I ask myself this all the time. Especially now, having to sift through my late partner’s personal items and heirlooms, letting go of each object feeling like letting go of him all over again, or connection to his family, which I had taken seriously. Especially now, surrounded by the artifact for a life that no longer exists or completely makes sense. When is saving things nourishing ties to our lineage, grounding and strengthening? When is letting things go liberating, making space for change, novelty, innovation? Gary loved his family’s history, dove into genealogy, and war history to understand his father and grandfathers’ experiences, kept one grandfather’s booklet of golf scores, another’s christening gown. Until recently we had dead German’s WWII helmet in our basement, a silver knife from Hitler’s Alpine retreat-turned-teahouse, a map of France printed on silk issued to Spitfire pilots to help them if they crashed behind enemy lines, a diary full of minuscule perfect pencil writing and short matter-of-fact sentences including about the day the twenty year old owner was gassed in the trenches and the subsequent year recovering in hospital. We had vases brought from England in the 1850s and tea trays, and yes, dishes. Gary decided to use the silverware he inherited from his godmother rather than just keep it in its wooden box in the basement. Slowly pieces are disappearing. There are only three soup spoons left. The forks’ tines becoming twisted as the cutlery doubles as screw driver at the hands of a clueless and enterprising roommate. I decided to keep one set of dishes. An absurd number of increasingly tiny plates. The kids can have the set once I’m tired of it or after I die. Gary broke dishes all the time and was unbothered by this. Everything dies everything ends, he’d say. He was certainly right about that, can’t really argue there. Except, all over the world ancient dishes and other artifacts have been, are being, unearthed by archaeologists for us to marvel at, exquisite links to our humanity, intelligence and skill, at once remote and immediate. Old things remind me that things don’t have to be as stupid and ugly as they are now, that we used to know how create furniture by hand that was at one sturdy and delicate, human scaled rather than economy-of-scaled, knew how to design spoons with necks as thin and graceful as a swan’s. Old laws remind me how far we’ve come, and of the weird shit that was important to our forbears and who actually wielded power — the blueberry lobby? The baker’s guild? What memories are we ok losing? What potential wisdom are we ready to sever ties with? My lack of answer gives me a stomach ache, makes me nervous, but I may start using the china more.