Orphan Plate, broken
dessert post*
This morning, in my son’s room, I found this broken plate.
The plate had entered our lives long ago, years before this son was born, via a neighbor delivering Christmas cookies. I listened from my kitchen as the neighbor gave the cookies to my partner. My partner promised to return the plate, and the neighbor replied that she didn’t want it back. She was trying to get rid of it, she said.
At the time, I imagined we might add the plate to a donation pile or give it to someone else, but the plate stayed with us for years. It followed us to our new home. It managed to stay in our rotation of plates.It was a good size. I neither loved it nor hated it, but some part of me could not give up this sense of this plate as a kind of orphan, unwanted by its original owner, staying with us permanently, but with a question mark: Permanently?
I felt a mild sense of relief to find it broken this morning. Its journey had concluded. We saw that plate through.
Last night I went to a talk between Anne DeMarcken and Connor Bouchard-Roberts, two small press publishers (click the links and check them out!). Anne talked about the life of a book, about how the moment it’s purchased it’s liberated from capitalism. After that it may be given away, resold on the cheap, left in an airport, etc. Maybe it will sit on a shelf and be read by no one, but maybe it will be marked-up, dog-eared, and passed through many hands—loved!
A couple of weeks ago, Sarah wrote a post here reminding us (via Kate DiCamillo) that “Everything’s alive!” and the idea keeps returning to me. As I work to decorate a new creative space, I find myself sorting through books and objects, thinking about the lives of these things, about what is beloved, what is useful, and what is simply clutter.
And then again, what about the in-between things, like the orphan plate, the thing that is not quite beloved, but storied nonetheless?
*Dessert post is a new feature on The Scrap Heap, a bite-sized follow up to our longer missives.
I hear you.