One afternoon, as a teenager in the nineteen hundreds, I’m in the kitchen and I open the coffee cup cupboard, which was over the counter. Back when no one questioned upper cabinetry. And I open this cupboard and a turquoise plastic measuring cup comes tumbling out at me and before I can react, it hits the tile counter and cracks. Like totally unusable cracks. And my mom scoops it up and is immediately in tears.
In my defense… it’s my blog so of course I’m mounting a defense… this cupboard was filled with a lifetime of coffee cups and what we now know were poisonous plastic travel mugs. Back then there were no decluttering YouTube channels espousing the freedom of only keeping good coffee cups that are worth drinking from. And what I gathered from whatever ensued, this measuring cup was my grandmother, Sweetie’s. And if we know anything about Sweetie it’s that she was an excellent baker. All my favorite cookies and pies are Sweetie’s. One time when I was little, we were baking together. She held up a sharp knife and asked me if I wanted to bake my hand. Wide-eyed, I quickly hid my hand behind my back and assured her I most certainly did not.
So earlier this summer, Nate was eating his two thousandth quesadilla and he couldn’t get the Tajín to come out. I dig around in the silverware drawer and thoughtlessly hand him one of his yellow chopsticks to poke into the container. A second later I hear it snap. Like totally unusable snap. And I scoop it up and am immediately in tears.
This is one of four sets of chopsticks we bought during our last family trip to Portland. We picked them out at the Japanese garden: James blue, Jaimie pink, Jacob green, and Nate yellow. And now our set of four is down to three. Just like our family.
I let myself have a good cry over broken chopsticks and beat myself up on why I didn’t hand him one of the steel straws and then finally surrender to the impermanence of everything. Then wouldn’t you know, we go to Japan.
And in a sea of hundreds of chopsticks, stores and stores of them, I find the EXACT yellow chopsticks Nate broke. Identical. Not a good match. Exactly the same.
I wasn’t even searching. They just found me.