VINTAGE THURSDAY--KITCHEN

These are in the upstairs kitchen---Caro's domain. I'd had visions of putting lots of lovely pastel glassware and dishes into these cabinets. We took off the almost-black doors and painted all the kitchen that wasn't yellow formica, including the shelves which divided all the cabinets into neat sections.

I bought dozens of the little plastic doohickeys which stick into the holes in the sides of the cabinets to hold up the shelves---clear ones. Wrong size. I got so involved in Life And Other Things, I just tossed the bags in a drawer and left it "for later." And the shelves---alas, the shelves. They got slotted on their edges between cabinet and fridge for who-knows-how-long, and when I just couldn't stand it any longer trying to wrestle broom or mop out of the alley, they got put somewhere out in the garage (still for "later") and are there now, probably under fifteen boxes of Southern Living, sandwiched between the cute little cherry-buffet-that-pulls-out-into-a-table and Caro's first piano.

So everything is in a tall thin space, and for some things, like tall vases and pitchers, it's OK, but for small clumps of round things, they just crouch in a puddle of color at the bottom of their niche, like a flock of chicks under the big sky.

And the "later" turned out to be about eight years, as we used the sunny spot in that kitchen as home for the Volkswagen-sized birdcage for our Blue and Gold macaw, and with all the cannisters filled with peanuts and bird food and treats and fortune cookies and expired cereal and nuts---well, it turned into HIS kitchen, with the counters and stove lightly dusted with bird fluff at all times.

Then, he went to live with friends, and Caro went into cleaning mode. With a vengeance. She scrubbed and cleaned and mopped and sanitized that place like a Crime-Scene Cleanup crew. Then she started delving into cabinets, shelves, boxes-never-unpacked, and treated the whole place like one of those TV "use your own stuff, but improve your home" shows, getting something from my china cabinet, something from a wall downstairs, mingling and arranging and making just wonderful displays.

The shelves are mostly grouped by color---there's Yellow:

A corn-shaped tureen (one of those bits of ceramic ware that I pick up on Goodwill shelves, and think of sometimes as Made in Therapy, a tall coffee urn which matches a set of yellow octagonal plates, and a lovely, buttery-sheened tureen with jonquils, made by my talented Sis during her first pregnancy as her young husband spent endless hours and days in Med School:




Then there's blue---several shades, mostly teal and turquoise. The little glass fridge bowls were collected over several years, and I love their little shapes and colors. They take having "things in dishes" in the fridge to a whole new level. The pitcher with its several-colors-of-glasses was the "fancy set" in our house in the Fifties, and I've always been afraid the handle would come off its moorings and pour something over a pretty tablecloth:



And burgundy. I do not know anything about the two pitchers, save that they make me happy to look at them, the way the light glints off the smooth crockery. The ball one is marked "HALL" in a black circle, with the number 633, and the other just has a pressed-into-the-clay-before-glazing "Made in USA" with the burgundy paint puddled into the deep lettering.

The jewelly grapes are from a going-out-of-business sale at Waccamaw (anyone remember those stores?) and I think they probably cost fifty cents---we got LOADS of frosty fruit at that sale, including two boxes of golden apples, marked $19.99 on each box of a dozen. The 75% off sale rang them up at 5.00 per box, and when we opened the boxes that Christmas, we discovered that each apple had a $19.99 dangly price tag!

The center tray is the "one thing left from our wedding presents" which were given my parents so many years ago---Mother treasured it and would barely let me WASH it, let alone put food on it for serving. When we were sharing out the household goods after she died and Daddy had sold the house, I noticed a small sticker of adhesive tape on the back, with her name in that distinctive left-handed slant.

I've always wondered whose funeral or church doings would have been of such import as to warrant her using that precious, forbidden piece of dishware.