Previous Challenge Entry (Level 4 – Masters)
Topic: CABIN (09/08/22)
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TITLE: Grandma Hattie's Dishes | Previous Challenge Entry
By Jennifer Percell
09/14/22 -
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“It's too hot! I hate yard sales!”
“We will do one more and then go home and have popsicles.”
“Yay! Popsicles!”
Since when did used pajamas cost five dollars? I will just have to buy fabric. I walk through the card tables and overturned boxes to check for bargains. The dishes are spread out on an antique table, no whole sets, lids without their original sugar bowls and cracked saucers with no cup. It sits under three other dishes, the design of green cameo ladies barely visible between several vases. The bowl I move slides and the man who catches it starts to tease but stops, I guess, because of my tears.
“Mama, I want a book, pleeease?”
“Yes,” I say with no awareness of her question. The din of shoppers, fans and fussy children disappears as the vegetable dish becomes my entire focus. I rearrange the table carefully, and realize I am forgetting to breathe. The lid is gone, but the dish is perfect, the cameos on either side of the handles and a God Bless Our Home sampler printed in the center. 25 cents is written on masking tape, but no-one can place a value on the sudden, living color memory of Grandma Hattie's dishes.
Years of counseling, yearning for memories that help me identify the blocked traumas that paralyze my heart, and a 25 cent dish opens the floodgates. Clearly, I see, a green checked tablecloth, I smell steaming dishes of grandma's boiled potatoes and a platter of sweet corn. I taste sliced garden tomatoes, cucumbers floating with onions in vinegar and bowls of cream and strawberries picked on some long-ago afternoon.
I am a little girl; I am hungry, and I am in awe of the full glass of creamy milk from grandma's tin dairy box on the porch. I see Grandma, tall, stern, plaited gray hair and sensible shoes. Bubbles her dog snuggles up to my leg looking for crumbs. As grandma fills her glass and offers her clipped words of thanks, I stare into the empty green plate in front of me. I am sitting on an upturned cooking pot to lift my chin above the table edge. Grandma spoons potatoes over the hearth in the center of the plate, corn covers the braided rug and cast-iron spider pan just inside the bottom rim. Tomatoes hide the high-backed chair. I move the corn to see the bellows.
My hands tremble as I pay for the books and my precious bringer of memories, good memories I had lost.
Colonial Homestead by Royal. Driving home I taste the Green Stamps Grandma redeemed to collect a set of twelve place settings, six pieces each. The perspective of the design on the platter zoomed out to show the entire scene. I remember a large dinner table where I would picture Laura Ingalls stringing buttons and playing with corn husk dolls.
Grandma Hattie read the evening paper while we ate, silently I created a story for the characters in the cabin, eating only to clear the backdrop for my tales. Scenes where Ma always held the frightened children and Pa filled the cabin with laughter. In my mind's eye Ma quilted, Pa stoked the fire, and all the children were safe and innocent.
“Where did that come from?” Keith asks as I fill the veggie bowl with steaming potatoes.
“From a sale.” I offer instead of, 'from my deepest memory'. I am not yet ready to tell him that a memory has broken through. I must hold this piece of me close until my perspective can zoom out and see more. For now, I only know how the cabin in those dishes became home in my mind when I desperately needed to escape the house I lived in. God has given me a back door to the memories I have craved so much. He has let me enter my trauma through Grandma's house and her dishes.
Slowly, gently, I see that He will take me by the hand into the rooms I fled, now that I truly live in a home where Ma always holds the frightened children and Pa sings and laughs. My loving God knows the way to my wholeness, He has shown me first how a delightful game was really a crucial survival skill, and I know that the little girl at Grandma Hattie's table was never really alone.
**True story of the beginning of my recovery from childhood trauma. Thanks to my family's collecting efforts I now own 12 place settings of six pieces each.
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Intense, and heartfelt. It held a myriad of emotions and was inspiring as well.
Thank you for sharing.
God bless~
God Bless~