Another Change During the Pandemic — I’m Using the Good China

By MARY WISNIEWSKI

CHICAGO TRIBUNE

AUG 24, 2020 AT 12:52 PM

After Mary Wisniewski’s parents died, the writer and her siblings cleared out their house. She kept her parents’ set of formal china and has found comfort using it during the pandemic. (Photo credit: Mary Wisniewski)

I’m using Ma and Dad’s wedding china.

I’ll sometimes have tea in a gold-rimmed cup with a matching saucer, or put my peanut butter-and jelly sandwich on a fancy dessert plate.

For their wedding in 1948, my parents got a set of Taylor, Smith & Taylor china, with brown scrolls and pink roses and yellow and blue forget-me-nots. There were serving platters and a gravy boat, along with all the big and little plates and bowls. The set was stored in special quilted and zippered pouches, for use only on Easter, Thanksgiving and Christmas.

But cups started to break, and the china couldn’t go in the dishwasher or the microwave. So as the family got bigger, the wedding set got supplanted by pedestrian ’70s-era Corelle ware, which hardly ever breaks, even if you try really, really hard. The flower set faded from memory, until first my father died, and then my mother, and my brothers and sisters and I had to figure out what to do with everything so we could clear out the house.

There were so many things. Two long lifetimes of things. You don’t really appreciate how much a person can accumulate, until you have to clear out a house. A silver wedding anniversary coffee set. A golden anniversary framed certificate of congratulations from Pope John Paul II. Bicentennial milk glass plates — a set of four! — with heroic scenes from the American Revolution. Stacks of handmade lace doilies, crocheted by long dead great aunts. Boxes of paper dolls from the ’50s — the Lennon sisters, Lucy and Desi, Katy Keene — some with torn-off heads. Stacks of paperback mysteries. Costume jewelry. Scratched towers of 45s. Half of a JFK porcelain salt and pepper set — the rocking chair but not the president. Bozo’s Circus ticket stubs.

And oh, the religious stuff. There were soft, leather-bound missals for translating the Latin Mass, whole and broken rosaries, and a little red Marshall Field’s box full of tin holy medals likely received at Knights of Columbus “volunteer appreciation” events, or for winning school spelling bees. It seemed wrong to toss the box of medals, so it’s sitting on my porch, in the hope that I’ll forget what it is and throw it out someday by mistake.

Most of the actual treasures — the Little Orphan Annie secret decoder ring and the Mickey Mouse watch — were snapped up quickly. My little sister and I both wanted a blue Depression-era glass lemonade pitcher (she got it), and an older brother won a polite struggle for the covered candy dish shaped like a sleigh we all remembered from Christmas.

Many things no one could use, but it still hurt to get rid of them. I packed up all the clothes, in tears, remembering how proud my mother had been of that lilac dress with the shawl, or the black-and-white polka-dot peplum skirt suit she liked because it was slimming. I remembered when she wore them at weddings and other family parties. I took a moment, breathed hard and stuffed them into black trash bags for Goodwill.

Objects unlock memories. Finding an old embroidered handkerchief or a music box can take you back in ways a photograph can’t. They’re time machines. They carry the smell and feel of the past. To hold your father’s prayer book is to be with him again, for a moment. That’s why fires and floods are so hard on families, even when everyone makes it out OK. That’s why it’s so tempting to hang on to things, until the house overflows, and you die, and your kids have the agony of deciding what to keep, what to trash and what to give away. They feel like they’re losing their parents again, in pieces.

No one clamored for my parents’ china set — it was too much. I foolishly took it, though my house is small and I didn’t give big dinner parties even before the pandemic. I tested it for lead (it is fine), put it away and wondered what to do with it.

And then one day I decided to use it. The queen’s not coming to tea, so there’s no point in waiting for her. It has been a depressing year, and it cheers me to sit down in front of the dreadful evening news with some cookies on a gold-rimmed plate with painted posies around the border. It makes me think of Ma and Dad and 1948, with all its postwar hope and opulence, and all those Christmases and Easters past.

And if I break them, and I will, that’s one less thing my kids will have to deal with when I’m gone.

Mary Wisniewski is a Chicago writer and the author of “Algren: A Life.”