The Tea Cup
In my corner cupboard sits a tea cup resplendent among the other items on display, celebrating the trifecta of rebirth: Spring, Easter, and Mother’s Day. It once belonged to my mother who received it from me years earlier as a token of my appreciation for taking caring of my infant son while my husband and I enjoyed a week-long cruise around the Caribbean. During the vacation I had the opportunity to visit Grand Cayman Island, which is known for its duty free shopping and fine china offerings. It was here that I found the perfect gift for my mother; there it was—a lovely, bright yellow teacup replete inside with colorful spring flowers painted on a white background. It was cheerful, radiant, and unique—just like my mother. The day I presented it to her, she cast aside all her other teacups, and it became her favorite henceforth.
My mother was a woman of her time and of simple tastes. Born in 1923, she grew up in New Braintree, MA, a little cow town where less than 400 people lived and worked among the bovine crowd, which greatly outnumbered the residents. She was isolated from the broader world in an age when radio was just coming into its zenith in homes across the country. Yet, somehow that did not prevent her from desiring something apart from what her parents had achieved, for they, too, were people of their own time. In her youth, her sights were set far beyond the pastures of their 350 acre dairy farm.
I distinctly remember my mother having a sense of propriety without being pretentious. An ingenuous person, she was, also, well aware that my father and she were of humble means, mostly owing to the 7 children they had managed to create within the first 18 years of their 60 year marriage. Support of their large family required my father’s earnings as a skilled pattern maker along with income generated from a lawnmower business they founded and operated together for many decades. Still, it was a financial stretch to end each month on the plus side, leaving little to no money for anything beyond necessities.
Financial limitations dictated that certain elements of style were beyond her reach, but, that never completely defined her. Throughout her life, she maintained habits that reflected her sense of pride amidst the simplicity she was bound to. For instance, she insisted on consuming her daily coffee and tea from bone china. A mug would have been unthinkable! A collection of several sets of tea cups sat in the corner of the kitchen counter top, at the ready to serve the parade of daily guests that included family, friends, and business associates, to whom she provided countless cups of coffee around the kitchen table during her lifetime.
Her tea cup silently bore witness to all kinds of conversations, from the mundane to the profound. It was touched by her hands, sometimes nervous hands, sometimes caressing hands, often grateful hands. Problems were solved over this tea cup, and laughter frequently floated above the surface of this tea cup; tears sometimes helped wash it, too. It was the conveyor of relationships; when set upon the table, it signaled an occasion, creating relief from an ordinary existence, and thwarting the possibility of tedium. My mother has been gone for well over a decade, but her tea cup has become emblematic of her unpretentious dignity, and of all those relationships divined long ago, in the tea leaves at the bottom of her cup.
Image: The Tea Cup, photo by Lisa M. Careau