![]() ![]() ![]() It had belonged to a beloved aunt, and by giving it to me, she’d kept it in the family. The mother who gave it to me never liked it, but I did. The kitschy potholder with its imitation-quilt cow makes me smile. The ceramic plate makes me think of fruit pies, and summer barbecues, and autumn leaf-raking parties amid the burnished red of fallen maple leaves. Both are gone now, but they live on, in part, through the workaday keepsakes whose value no one would guess. Both formed families with men from other cultures. Parents lost, dreams given up, some wishes fulfilled. Small-town Jamaica versus small-city New England. My mothers’ upbringings could not have been more different, though sometimes they seemed similar in the telling. The women who took turns raising me in different periods of my childhood in their blended households. Seemingly innocuous items from the kitchens of my mother and stepmother. ![]()
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