The China
Stephen Mosher
The china was always kept put away. I don’t remember it having been used, once, while I was growing up. Perhaps there were times when there were dinner parties with grown ups to which I was not invited - maybe these were the occasions when the china was used, but, as far as I could remember, the china was never taken out of the cupboard.
I thought it was the prettiest, most elegant thing I had ever seen.
Sometimes I would open whichever cupboard housed the china, in the various homes of the Mosher family history, and I would just look at it. I didn’t ever pick a piece up, though I would reach out and feel the smooth cool touch of the surface, but what really appealed to me was the colors - the brilliant sheen of the white highlighting the delicate pale blue flowers. I always believed it to be the pretty, pretty, good china that My Mama never used. From house to house we moved, and the china remained in the cupboard. Then one day, when Mom and Dad had settled into the house that would be the Mosher family homestead for the next four decades, I walked into the dining room to find Mama deeply entrenched in a new project. She had bought little white plush cases for each style of dish in the china set, as well as fine white sheets of padding paper and doilies; she was storing her precious and beloved china in these bone white cases and placing them in the bottom cupboards of the china hutch. There would be no scratches in the dishware on her watch, it would be protected, it would be safe.
The china stayed in those white plush cases in the hutch until the day Mommy moved into the Memory Care Facility. Untouched. And inside those plush white cases, it couldn’t even be looked at. It was just in the cupboard.
Two years ago I was home to visit Mommy in the home and Daddy at their home. He and I were trying to make some headway with their estate, trying to determine what would be kept, what the Mosher children would take, what should be sold on eBay, and what should be saved for the estate sale. One of the days of my trip, he had pulled the china out of the hutch and unzipped the plush white cases. He was gazing at the dishes with an expression of wistful memory and concerned bewilderment. What, I asked, was he doing? He explained that he didn’t know what to do with the china. Mama had, he told me, loved this china so much, loved how pretty it was, loved having it in her care - but she was always too afraid to use it, afraid that it would get broken. Daddy told me he thought it had been used maybe five or seven times in the near sixty years they were married. He had such a loving sense of nostalgia about the dishware that I couldn’t bear to see him let it go out of the family… but I didn’t want to ask for it. If it were going to sell at an estate sale, he should get to have that money. So I thought about it for a day, and I ran it by my husband, who approved my idea before I had even finished expressing it.
The next day, while sitting with Daddy I asked him to, please, let me buy the china, to, please, let me take it back to New York and put it in circulation, to, please, let me keep Mama’s beloved china in the family. He expressed concern over the money it would cost me and I promised him it would be fine, that I could afford it, and that I really wanted to do this, that it wasn’t some sentimental gesture. I wanted to give my Mother’s china the life it never had.
Me Father said yes.
And I packed the china up and drove it back to New York City from Texas, to insure its safe arrival.
At our home we have weekend luncheons. We planned, originally, to do one a month but it shook out as more like five a year. We pick a weekend day, we carefully choose the right four people to have, arranging the dinner table like a matchmaking event, introducing people who might become friends, bringing together old friends who haven’t seen each other in a while, and rejoining family that spends too little time together. Sometimes we do these luncheons with the full set of dishware that I bought during the pandemic, mere months before my encounter with my Father that landed me with two brand new sets of dishes to store in my kitchen (which I didn’t mind, in the least) and other times we use my parents’ china. During my most recent trip home to visit my sweet parents, Me Father asked if there was anything else I’d like from the family estate, as it was getting close to time to call the estate sale agents. I came home with some of Mama’s tablecloths that she bought during the Portugal years, and the ceramic pig salt and pepper shakers from Portugal. They sit on the sideboard next the the pale pink depression glass salt and pepper shakers that I bought on eBay because they were identical to the ones Mama had. So, with my parents’ china, tablecloths, and shakers, and with our stemware and crystal, we are able to entertain our New York family with five course luncheons and good liquor, once every couple of months, and, each time, I make sure to announce that we are eating off of the good china of Juana Mosher.
I promised my Daddy that that china would be used, and it is. And every time that we use the dishware, we keep the legacy alive, we keep young John and Juana in the consciousness of the universe, and we keep love in the air.
