I broke my favorite plate. It was where it shouldn't have been, on the coffee table, balanced atop a pile of unruly books and magazines. Tapped slightly by my foot as I changed positions on the couch, it fell in slow motion to the floor. I almost caught it.
It's a colorful, stripey, everyday thing I took from my mother's cupboard when we were cleaning out the house, the only one like it that I have. Every time I used it, it made me smile because it reminded me of her, bright and cheerful. I think she loved it, too. The plate was a daily link between daughter and mother, the living and the dead. When we buried her several years ago, my sister Lane gathered a bunch of other pottery from the house, broke it on purpose, and made a lovely mosaic that went with Mom to the grave. This plate's too late. Am I being morbid? I don't mean it to be.
The plate, when it fell, was sticky with syrup from waffles definitely outside of my diet regime - my mother would have noticed that, too. Swift retribution, she would have called the breaking of the plate. I couldn't bear to throw it away so I collected all the pieces from under the couch and left them on the kitchen counter overnight, awaiting inspiration. In the morning I had a pile of shards, an intimate gathering of maple-loving ants, and a small, persistent stab of regret I couldn't shake. I brushed the ants off on the back porch (my mother hated killing bugs) and washed the pieces clean. They are big enough that I could probably glue them back together if that made sense, but it probably doesn't. I don't NEED this plate whole again in any physical sense. It's time to let it go.
These are the stages in our lives - the accumulation of things that make us happy and then their gradual release back into the world. When I look around my house in a still-abstract, but not-too-distant down-sizing exercise (when I move, what will I do with all this stuff?), I am struck by how little I can predict which of the quotidian pots and paintings, spoons, tablecloths and books my children will want. Which ones conjure images and emotions from their childhood? Which ones will make them smile for just a minute as they think of me?