Description: Color. Habit. Quirk.
The glasses were the first to go. That first apartment didn’t have a dishwasher and barely had enough space on the counter for one drying rack onto which we precariously stacked entire dinner parties worth of dishes. Dinner parties incongruous with our tiny space, lack of central air, and an overzealous smoke detector that left guests frequently waving dishtowels at the ceiling while I finished dinner. Dinner parties thrown in the haze of newlywed life with glassware that was pristine and new and doomed to
The plates and bowls likewise experienced a winnowing. There was the year we hosted Thanksgiving in our microscopic apartment only for the sink to back up and James to spend two solid days washing dishes by hand after it stopped shooting black sludge upward. Plates break in the melée of life, and one year for Christmas my mother convinced one of my friends to sell me the remnants of her identical set to replace my own losses, the style long since discontinued.
The silverware has since followed suit, though its disappearance is more of a mystery. We have three spoons left- three. Are the children digging an escape route in the back yard? Are they hoarding them like a strange Victorian currency? Or most probably, has my zeal for chore mastery and requirement that even young children bus their dishes after meals carried the casualty of spoons heading out with the trash? I don’t know the answer, but I do know that the forks are next for extinction and I panic when I