The kitchen is completed to where I can bring dishes back in from the garage to the house.  Because they are so precious and delicate, my grandmother’s dishes sit in a heavy box on top of other boxes.  They are labeled “fragile”.

The box is too heavy to lift, so I take out cup after cup, and carry each one up five steps, unwrap it, and go back down for another.   I feel it as a pilgrimage, not as strenuous as walking The Camino de Santiago, but still each step mindful as I carry and cherish my grandmother’s dishes.  She passed away when I was 13, and my mother gave them to me when I was married at 21.

Now, I learn they are worthless to others, that they can’t even be given away.  The suggestion is to use them now, so they might as well go into the dishwasher, though it could risk their rims of gold. Instead I  think of the beauty and mindfulness in hand-washing them, the caress and connection between present and past, the cleansing and renewing of ancestral memory.

I wash them by hand and place them in a sacred place, cup by cup, plate by plate, breath by breath, step by step.