I have very few memories of childhood, especially before age nine, but the ones I have are vivid as daylight. My mother kept the sugar in the largest of five porcelain graduated canisters shaped like mushrooms. The second largest held flour. The middle one held old necklace chains, reading glasses, and other miscellaneous items that needed repairing. The second smallest was always stuffed with the bright pink packets of the artificial sweetener that my mother dumped into her coffee in pounds, back before saccharine caused cancer. The smallest was perpetually empty.
In the largest, the sugar mushroom, there lived a small bluish-green plastic teacup from the tea set that my mother played with as a small girl. I remember it whole and complete, but when I found the cup recently, now safely ensconced in the large Tupperware canister full of flour in the fridge, it was torn down the side, soft and pliable and irrevocably discolored. I felt myself frown at the state of disrepair in which I discovered this relic of my youth while a thousand fragmented memories tornadoed through my mind with startling clarity as I slid a finger along the tiny broken handle.
When I was a little girl, very few things delighted me more than feeding the colony of ants that lived underneath my grandmother’s flower box on our front porch. I remember doing this well into my teens but my mother says that I began around five or six. As she narrated, an image flooded my mind’s eye: a five year old version of myself, with lighter, platinum hair, the same chunky thighs and endless curiosity. She would have carefully maneuvered a brown steel chair away from the kitchen table and leveraged her entire body weight to shove it over to the counter that remains, to this day, covered with bright orange Formica. She would have awkwardly climbed onto the chair to bring herself to enough height to lean across the counter to reach for the largest mushroom canister and life the lid. Knowing better than to plunge a tiny, germy hand into the whole of the sugar, she would have artfully scooped up a heap of the stuff and poured the entire contents directly into her hand, most of it simply overflowing and landing back in the canister, germs and all. Then, she would drop the blue/green teacup and clench her chubby fingers around her prize as she jumped from the chair with more confidence than she should have and ran, trailing sugar from her eager fist, all the way out the door and to the flower box on the front porch.
From there, I filled in the images with real memories from the later years that I can recall. I would deposit the loot in a small pile near the bottom of the flower box and then lie on my stomach, prop my chin up on my hands, and wait. On the best days, the sun would drizzle down as a warm, buttery glow that would cast a cool shade over me as it set behind the house. The bobwhites would coo and I would think about my grandmother, who simultaneously taught me to braid my hair and imitate the bobwhite in one afternoon. The mild summers were clean and comfortable, leaving the air so weightless that nothing stirred. Soon, the ants would discover the unbidden abundance and the fascinating ritual would soon follow. I would watch them for hours on end, each one carrying one single grain of sugar back to his colony. Often I would fall asleep there on the cool concrete and in the still air and wake up when my mother would call my name at that magical moment just before day becomes darkness. And all the sugar would have gone.
Those were good days.
As a sad smile played on my lips, I scooped and measured two cups of flour for the recipe in progress. Before I put away the canister, I turned the teacup over in my hands a couple of times. I looked at my mother and considered the gray that would fleck her hair if she didn’t fastidiously combat it with color and the lines that grace her face and the resigned mixture of sadness and wisdom in her eyes. I wondered what she remembered when she touched this cup.
Along with the cup, I put away thoughts of woebegone memories and rooted myself back in the present. In this life, a million miles away from the girl whose greatest happiness was feeding the ants, and in this world where people don’t live on curiosity alone. Glancing at my flour-covered hands, I started toward the sink to wash them. Then stopped. And dusted them off on my new jeans instead.
There are still good days to come.
