China gardens

In which a porcelain magnolia implores us to please, please, take it along with us.

The women in my family, it seems, have always loved flowers.  I spent last Sunday sorting through the china that had belonged to three, maybe more, generations of my family.  Spread hopefully across the dining room table and sideboard, waiting to make their introduction in the foyer, were entire gardens of cut class and etched crystal, hammered silver and silver plate, and painted porcelain.  Much of it was simply not to our modern taste: garish pink-flowered vases, gold-embroidered plates and bowls, china beaten to stiff peaks like meringues.  With sharp eyes, my older sister and I passed over these objects, once-beloved, one-valued, once-desired.  "This is Limoges," my mother said, a trifle desperately, as my sister picked up a platter and pretended to fling it, frisbee-style.  And: "That's Irish bleak [belleek]," said my mother, pointing at a plate.  "Referring to the food served on it?" joked my sister.

II.

Fake flowers - whether formed from silk or clay, embroidered or embedded, sketched or painted - do not appeal to me, and never really have.  I'm no longer tremendously invested in the idea of authenticity, but there is still a point to real flowers, and fake flowers lack the earthiness, the carnal scent of a real flower.  

Yet these gardens, unspooled in elaborate, cursive scripts, spreading across the dining room table like weeds in July, reminded me of the seasonality of real flowers, of their rarity.  Now that flowers can be picked up from the corner bodega on a Tuesday night, purchased on impulse from the florist for angry wives or ordered for impatient girlfriends from internet websites, it may be hard to remember that year-round flowers were once rarities for all but the richest people: those who could afford the heat for winter greenhouses.  Flowers were once luxurious things, or seasonal things, or both; and luxury items therefore imitated flowers, in their flush and fullness.

III.

When you find these sorts of objects at a yard sale or auction, you are likely to wonder about the histories behind them, but I already knew most of these stories.  Here was the twelve-person china set, imprinted with delicate pink roses, bought by my uncle while on R&R in Vietnam, brought home as a wedding present to my mother, and shipped successfully to at least four different houses with the loss of only one dessert plate.  It included twelve small, tear-dropped-shaped plates which must be intended for resting chopsticks, though they've certainly never been used as such.  In fact, the set has rarely been used at all, and so I wrapped each piece carefully in newspaper and boxed it all up, to send it to my younger sister.  The slightly wonky vase, covered with flowers in reddish jewel tones, was swept off a side table by the collie's tail, one night in the early 1950s, and frantically glued back together by the babysitter before my grandparents came home.  The delicately etched glass serving dishes had belonged to R., a close friend of my grandmother who was never able to have children and had no other family to leave them to.  In 1950, when my uncle was born, expectant fathers still smoked cigars in waiting rooms, and new mothers still enjoyed extended postpartum stays in the hospital; and so my young father was sent to live with R. for a week.  "It was the happiest week of my life," she remembered, sadly and dreamily, at this exact dining table, many years ago, while my teenaged sisters and I squirmed and looked down at our plates.

IV.

We were driving to pick up more newspapers, past the street where my childhood art teacher lived, when my mother noticed the open house sign.  Of course, there was no question that we would not go: so she mumbled something to the real estate agent about "a friend who's looking," and he pretended to believe us.  The house was mostly empty, except for some of her art which had not yet sold.  It came as a shock to realize that it was not, actually, very good.  

There was a powder room tucked under the slanted eaves, just off the foyer; I remembered staring in its mirror as an adolescent and waiting, willing myself not to look so awkward.  The bookshelves were empty and shrunken, as a human body might be after so many decades: but I'd remembered them as enormous, at least five times larger, and crammed with books.  Upstairs, most rooms had once been given over to making or storing art, and only one narrow bed remained, covered with sketches that the appraisers had not wanted to take; but I remembered some of these sketches, from ten years' of lessons, and wished that I could claim them.  A picture frame held the photo of a terrier, long-ago loyal, his name scribbled across the bottom: Inky-Baby.   

I wandered back downstairs to the dining room, where a chandelier hung like a spider from the middle of a room empty but for a clawfooted Victorian sideboard marked "sold."  Random pieces of china were ranged across the top and tagged with prices.  I searched for something of significance that I could buy, a painting or photograph or book that reminded me of her; but, I realized, there was nothing left here but debris, the odds and ends of a life, and I had enough of that waiting for me at home, those scattered bits of other people's histories.