A Teapot of Memories
When you lose someone close, and after time has faded the harshest of your grief, what you are often left with is a collection of bittersweet memories that bring a tear to your eye and a simultaneous smile to your lips. The recollection of the smallest of incidents can sometimes sum up a person far more evocatively than a thousand spoken words ever could. One such recollection often comes back to me.
My mother had been baby sitting our two very young children overnight, and we had returned home mid-morning, the next day. Almost immediately on entering the house, my wife turned on the kettle for a long anticipated cup of tea. Meanwhile, my mother had seated herself at the kitchen table and was part way into her summary of the night’s events. When my wife lifted the lid of the teapot, she made a little exclamatory noise. “What’s happened to the teapot”, she said. My mother then proudly explained how she had taken it upon herself to kill two birds with one stone. The birds she had killed were her false teeth and the teapot; the latter of which she had used as a receptacle in which to soak the former in bleach overnight. Drinking our tea was not the blissful experience we were fully expecting it to be. It took us a long time to get our teapot back to the heavily stained condition that we preferred.
My mother died about ten years ago; she was in her nineties. I do miss my mum when I think of her, and it does make me sad, particularly if I’m in one of those sentimental moods that sometimes overtake us. It is at those extra sad times that I make myself think of that teapot incident, because it’s memories like this that help me miss her a little bit less.