By Katherine Rawson
My memories are stored in boxes in the barn, pieces of Ric and pieces of our life together. But what haunts my mind even more sometimes are the pieces that I left behind. Dishes, isn’t that funny? It was a small collection of Fiestaware that lived on the shelf over the kitchen sink. I packed up the dishes that belonged to my grandmother, of course, but I left the Fiestaware there.
Ric started it. He bought three small dessert bowls one day—orange, yellow, and blue. He bought them on impulse—he did everything on impulse—because he liked the colors. I liked them, too. Even more, I liked the idea of Fiestaware. Meals at his house (this was before we lived together) were depressing, aesthetically, eating off chipped crockery in the dark living room. But then Ric allowed this ray of beauty in, three bright bowls. And I fanned the flame. I gave Ric four dinner plates—two orange, two blue—as a Christmas present that year, and planned to give him the yellow ones the next year. They looked nice on the shelf in the kitchen next to the orange walls. The orange of the walls was called “light terra cotta” and the orange plates were “persimmon.”
That winter we painted the living room a warm, comforting beige—“clair de lune”. We tore up the stained wall-to-wall carpet and put down an oriental rug. When Ric’s birthday came in July, we sat in the new living room and ate strawberry shortcake out of Ric’s little bowls. He had the yellow bowl and I had the blue, and the afternoon sunlight filtered through the maple trees casting soft shadows on the clair de lune walls.
The next Christmas, soup bowls were in the store, so instead of the yellow plates, I got three bowls— orange, yellow, and blue. I argued with the clerk over the price, which wasn’t clearly marked. I won, but realized later that I was wrong and just had been in a grumpy mood. I tried to push the memory away, but the feeling still lurked in the corners, that somehow the gift was tainted.
I was getting ready to move in with Ric. I painted the tiny room that would become my office a luminous light blue—“crystal cove.” Then one cold winter day we rented a truck and moved my things in. Now we ate all our meals together in the beige living room—”light of the moon” off the orange and blue plates that were my plates now, too.
One by one, the original little bowls broke, as most things do, eventually. Ric held onto the pieces—he had a hard time letting things go. I put a shard of the yellow bowl in the garden, where it brightened up a shady patch of ferns. I put a bird feeder there, too, and we called each other to come look when interesting birds came to visit—a red-bellied woodpecker, a flock of migrating blackbirds, a bright pair of cardinals on a snowy day.
Somehow those yellow plates never got bought, though I never stopped intending to buy them. It was one of those many things that gets put off for the future. But then, suddenly, Ric’s future was gone. He just stopped living one day. It wasn’t expected. It just happened.
I left the house very quickly after that—I couldn’t stay—and packed up what I could in a hurry. But when it came to the Fiestaware, I just couldn’t take it away. It lived on the shelf over the kitchen sink, and that’s where I let it stay—the small broken bowls, the incomplete plates, the soup bowls tainted with argument. And in my mind, they are sitting there still, with their view out the window of the birdfeeder and the little yellow shard holding court among the ferns.
Other things are in boxes piled up in the barn by the house where I’m living now. On long summer afternoons, sunlight filters through the cracks and lights up stripes of dusty air. Bats nap among the dark rafters, and everyday another thin layer of dust and bat droppings settles on my boxes. Some day when I have my own home again, I’ll have to open them up. All the trapped memories will come flying out, and I’ll have to let them go. You can’t hold on to things forever, it all slips away, sooner or later—even the shards of Ric’s little bowls. It all slips away.