Reflections on a Sugar Bowl

By Chelsie Vandaveer

October 6, 2003

My silver sugar bowl is one hundred and seventeen years old today. It has an aura of age, the silver glinting behind the gray-black patina. It is tarnished beyond any effort to polish it. For more than one hundred years, it had a mate, a creamer. They were like old friends or maybe old lovers. But the sugar bowl is alone now.

Each face has an arch with dimples. About the arches are daisies, leaves, and ears of wheat. On one side within the arch is engraved "OCT 6" in italics, then "Logan" in careful Old English text, and underneath in italics again, "1886". The reverse in flourishing script says "from Grandma Cunningham".

Sugar Bowl

I memorized those names one Saturday long ago. I think that I was nine. My chores were done and gusts of rain splattered on the kitchen window. My mother was baking pies. My sisters were gone to music or dance lessons, or perhaps off with their friends. It was a rare occasion. I had my mother to myself.

My mother lifted the sugar bowl and the creamer down from the top shelf. I thought they were the most beautiful things in the world. They sat between us on the kitchen table. We talked at that table sharing remainders of pie crust baked with cinnamon and sugar. My mother gave the sugar bowl and the creamer to me that Saturday. She said someday I would have someone special, I would know who, and the pair should move on to another.

Before the sugar bowl and creamer went back to the shelf, my mother said that now they were mine and I should polish them. She looped a cotton rag over the tip of my finger and poured a thick pink liquid onto the rag. Making tiny circles I rubbed the oddly fragrant liquid over the silver surfaces and listened to the rain. As the polish dried white, I buffed the pair to the color of moonlight.

It became a rainy day ritual, polishing the sugar bowl and creamer. I was visiting with people I would never know, but they belonged to me. I liked to think that they appreciated my attention. Long ago, I probably polished away most of the silver.

There is a dissonance created by the passage of time; long ago seems far away. The kitchen table was gray and white and had chrome legs. Underneath each chair was a label with an ink drawing of palms and a camel. I was ashamed of myself that Saturday. When I was five, I had punched holes in the seat of one of the chairs. There, at a later time, I felt a peculiar grief over the inability to undo what I had done.

I remember little of what we talked about as we sat at that table. I see the reflection of the silver in the table top and the reflection of the table top in the silver. I smell the cinnamon and the silver polish, but I cannot recall if she ever told me who Logan was or Grandma Cunningham. I see the tears in her eyes, but I cannot see her face. That single Saturday, something important slipped away.

The tarnished sugar bowl is alone now. It cannot grieve for the loss of its mate. Out of the bits and pieces handed down by the generations, it alone endures, a relic that escaped fires and earthquakes and tornadoes and all the other hardships.

I am haunted by that odd peculiar grief again. I do not know what happened to the creamer. I was given a special charge, a sugar bowl and a creamer, matched and made to be together, kept side-by-side since Grandma Cunningham gave them to Logan. Something special slipped away in my lifetime, I cannot carry out my charge. The sugar bowl lost its mate.