Dianna
Bright has a purple color scheme in her kitchen, with a bosom-swell of plums
printed on the curtains, the tied-on cushions in the captain’s chairs at the
breakfast table, and the little crocheted-hanger-on-one-end dishtowel swinging
from the oven door. She has two shades
of purple placemats, which she alternates round the table, and sets the table for
two anew after every meal. She gets a
fresh plate, bowl, cup and saucer out of the cabinet while the last ones whirl
through the dishwasher, and puts the matching napkin back into a ring beside
each plate.
She’s house-proud and cookin’ proud and takes elaborately-concocted, wonderful casseroles and salads to Church Suppers and Missionary Society luncheons and can set out gorgeous tea-trays for Eastern Star, with all the tee-ninecy sandwiches spread right to the edge of the bread and lined up in pretty patterns and formations that she finds online.
Somehow, after her “raisin’” in a very small shotgun house with three siblings, and the attendant lack of many grace notes in the discordant symphony of their days, Dianna has a flair for gracious moments, and she loves to have a pretty house, set a pretty (and lavish, as the occasion may call for ) table, and almost most of all, she likes things to MATCH. None of the modern love for all things old, for her, nor a bit of rust paired with even the most exquisite lace would sway her, and she just doesn’t quite get the craze for the vintage items which cost more love and money now than they ever dreamt in their Duz-box and Kroger-giveaway beginnings. Except for matching "china," which she occasionally finds at yard sales or Goodwill.
She likes SETS of things---full service for eight “Everyday” dishes stand in her left-hand kitchen cabinet, remarkably intact for the twenty-one intervening years since her Wedding Shower.
Numerous small sets for four are arranged in the dining room's room-wide Hutch Wall, built by her husband Havlon, who is known best for the beautiful hutches and built-ins he creates right in people's dining rooms---any size, any space, with shelves and drawers and carving satin-smooth as fine furniture. He has a habit of always signing his work on the back, even if it means just writing his name on a board he's about to nail on a wall.
Dianna will trade dishes out for holidays and seasons, as long as
all the salad plates and butter dish and cream and sugar are of the same
pattern. She keeps that table set, and
it BRIGHTS her to look at it and know that things are in order. It MATTERS.
Diana
remembers, and like she swore all her childhood and teens, she’s DOING
BETTER.
Darling Rachel,
ReplyDeleteAs you or we might say, Dianna is LOOKING UP and GOING UP and is determined to stay UP. One sincerely hopes that there will be nothing in Dianna'a world that brings her DOWN.
Dianna's love of all things matching and co-ordinated is often the case for a great many people. Our parents you used to say that to want such things was very 'Newly Married' as well as wanting to paint a 'Feature Wall' a different colour from the rest. We have never done matching or feature walls, newly married or otherwise. Our style is definitely eclectic [the polite word for it], unco-ordinated [as Dianna might call it] or just plain 'Granny' as the youth of today may refer to it. Nevertheless, we love our stuff which has been acquired over the decades and found a home with us if we consider it beautiful or holding happy memories.
A phrase from our schooldays which was often employed to teach grammar and to inspire pupils to aim higher was..."Good, better best, never let it rest, 'til you've made your good better and your better best". Nowadays, as we support young people with university applications, we use the mantra...good enough is so much healthier than perfection. Why do better when one can settle for enough?
Oh, your perspective of Dianna's emotional eclat in her own little niche is spot-on!! Whilst I spelled out the words, I could smell the yesterday's bacon grease in the dishrag swipes of her Mama's kitchen table, as I sat that hot day decades ago, filling out my schedule/choices pad for her wedding to Havlon. We had gone in through the hall, to welcome COOLTH on that Mississippi day, only to reach the sealed-off-kitchen which was an inferno. It was a five o'clock appointment after work, and the afternoon sun was doing its due, whilst the one window A/C did its best with the Living Room and perhaps bedrooms down the hall, for the evening's retreat from all that HEAT.
DeleteI can still smell that little house, as we chatted and chose, and they told me what they wanted, and what they would provide themselves. She was from a BIG local family, mostly brothers, and you bet those sweet Delta wives of theirs COULD COOK. The wedding was lovely, with one SIL a florist, and two, absolute savants of the Singers, so flowers and clothes were perfection, and You've never seen such happy guests at any soiree or banquet as happy with that BIG Southern repast they laid out on the Ping-Pong table in the church. I swear I don't know how they reached all those plentiful dishes, it was so crowded and fine.
I have a love for the old stuff, and my Martha Gene has led me to scores of china patterns and flatware finds in Goodwill and Flea Markets---my heart and my closets overflow with the bounty of once-was-theirs and now-they're mine. Granny it is, by decade if not decor, and PINK is the color of the century for me. I just received an early Christmas gift of TWO long silky pink flags with handsome nutcrackers, which I wagered life and limb on yesterday, climbing up to put up hangers and get them on the unsightly stretch of dining wall where the workmen insisted on putting the enormous "fusebox" with its prison-grey tone. Leah thought it up and ordered them for me, just to make me happy with that corner. I collect wonders of the kin-and-friend kind with more eagerness than all the Royal Doulton in the bin, and still I KVELL over a Spode cup of tea.
My dear R,
ReplyDeleteHow splendid to step for a moment into the world of your Dianna Bright. She reminds me, irresistibly, of Hyacinth Bucket (or “Bouquet,” as she insisted), that indomitable guardian of Royal Doulton Periwinkle. Yet your Dianna is sketched with a gentler hand: less satire, more sympathy; less comedy of pretension, more the earnest loveliness of someone who has built her own orbit of order after growing up amid scarcity.
I confess she would receive a considerable shock to her sensibilities if she ventured into many a modern restaurant here in Scotland. Pressed linen tablecloths have gone the way of the dodo; matching china scarcely exists outside stately hotels; and the trend of serving food on chopping boards or slate tiles (an affectation I have not yet learned to admire) still holds sway. Only last year, poor G attempted to pour a delicate sauce over his meal, only to watch it cascade off the edge of the plank like a miniature culinary landslide, puddling on the table below. A sight to behold, though not one that stirs the appetite.
For my own part, I cherish a table set with a quiet sense of symmetry, but not the strict alignments Dianna so adores. I prefer the charm of an artful mismatching—patterns in conversation with one another rather than marching in lockstep. Yet I deeply admire Dianna’s devotion to her chosen aesthetic, for it springs from something honourable: the desire to bring grace where once there was none.
And how beautifully you reveal that origin. The contrast between her carefully curated present and the remembered austerity of her childhood—the oilcloth table, the coffeecan of utilitarian cutlery, the stingy paper napkins rationed one per meal—gives her character its true poignancy. It brings to mind a childhood friend whose mother insisted on keeping the plastic sheathing on her sofa and even the lampshades, as though life itself were too messy to trust; he grew up, in gentle rebellion, to create the cosiest rooms imaginable, every chair inviting, nothing hidden or hermetically sealed.
Dianna is not merely “keeping up appearances”; she is honouring a vow made long ago, a quiet promise to herself that life would be different once she had the reins. Her matching dishes, her purple-gleaming kitchen, her tidy table set afresh after every meal; these become not affectations but small daily triumphs, each one a soft declaration: I am doing better.
What moves me most is how kindly you chart that transformation. You never reduce her to caricature; you accord her the dignity of her efforts and the charm of her peculiarities. In your hands, she is not a figure of amusement but of understanding; a woman who has built her own citadel of grace, pattern by pattern, placemat by placemat, as though arranging beauty might stave off the old chaos.
Thank you, dear R, for another portrait touched with your unmistakable tenderness and exact observation. You have an eye not merely for detail, but for the quiet human truth that lies beneath it—a trademark of your skill and gift as a perceptive and graceful writer.
Yours ever,
ASD