There is a blue bowl on my shelf that belonged to her mother.
My mother gave it to me years ago, before the giving became complicated, before the question of what goes where and why was a question loaded with the weight of an ending rather than the lightness of a gesture. She gave it to me on a Tuesday without ceremony, the way she gives most things, practically, with a brief account of where it came from and the expectation that I would receive it the same way, practically, and put it somewhere useful.
I did not put it somewhere useful.
I put it on the shelf where I can see it from the kitchen table, where it catches the light in the afternoon in the particular way that blue things catch certain kinds of afternoon light, and every time I notice it I think of the woman who owned it before my mother, who I did not know well, who died when I was young enough that my memory of her is mostly texture and smell and the particular quality of her attention when she looked at me, which was the attention of someone who found children genuinely interesting rather than merely tolerable.
Three women have owned this bowl.
Or known it. Or been in rooms with it. My mother’s mother who I did not know well enough and my mother who I know as well as I know anyone and me, and the bowl has been in these rooms, in these lives, witness to the ordinary and the extraordinary in the way that objects witness things, without comprehension but with presence, just there, blue, catching the light.
I think about what it has seen.
I think about all the kitchens. All the hands. All the ordinary Tuesdays and the extraordinary days that also had kitchens in them, because the extraordinary days always have kitchens in them, the kettle going on, the hands needing something to do, the blue bowl sitting on whatever shelf it was sitting on, holding its own quiet and patient continuity, the line of women in the rooms around it coming and going, coming and going.
My daughter will have it when I am done with it.
I have not told her yet. She does not know about the bowl or the women or the line it represents. I will tell her. I am choosing when to tell her. I want to tell her in the kitchen, in the afternoon, when the light is right.
