The Things Around Me

For me holidays are all about family and food. An excuse to get together in a world where people are increasingly isolated. An excuse to bake a cake. I wish every day was a holiday. Today we had a small brunch with quiche, fruit salad, bread, cheese, and, of course, cake.

As I was uploading pictures of the girls to our flickr site for my family in California, I came across this picture which I had hurriedly taken earlier.



The silver platter in the upper right was a gift from my Mom and she is perfectly personified in it: strong, modest, beautiful, practical. Below that are some plates from a set that my Dad found for us at a second hand shop and lovingly flew out to Michigan from California. Dinner plates, salad plates, cups and saucers all flown out because he thought they were beautiful and thought that I would too. And he was right. The silver platter to the left of the plates is from Iran and a reminder of how much the idea of "home" can change over the course of a life. The silverware on the platter was a gift to my parents when they got married, a gift given to them with love more than thirty years ago and then, again, given with love to me from my mother.

And my cake lies on a white plate that Corey's Mom gave us when we moved to Michigan almost four years ago. Having left a lot of what we had back in California, this plate, and the others she gave us from her own cupboards, represents the foundations of the life we have built here. We fit what we could in a small trailer and a car and have made a home with it, with some help from our family. So, as I look around me now I don't see things anymore. I see the history of those things, the lives they once sat amongst, and the love of those who gave them to us.

The table holding up all this love is from Corey's Grandmother's home and, luckily, it is heavy, sturdy, and large.