Things We Lost, Things We Kept
In my grandparents' house in Arkansas, we had a hodge podge of random dishes and plates. I guess, looking back, you could call the decor Depression-style, and I loved it. I had my favorites--the plate with the cracks under the glaze and tiny roses circling the outer rim, the spoon that had a similar floral etching and had probably been part of an elegant set when it was new, a highball/Collins glass with vertical irish green stripes. I would think about my grandfather's stories of our ancestors from the old country while I sat with my glass of milk, imagining that somehow they lived in those stripes on the glass. Kids... Sometimes if I'm a homewares store, I'll find myself absently scanning the glassware section for those irish green stripes, but I never find it. The remnants of my Arkansas childhood are all gone now. My grandparents, my childhood collections of rocks and sticks and bottles that my brother and I dug up in the back field, things I wrote from