The Tea Set

“I could do worse than become my own grandma, or anyone of the strong women who raised us. Our strengths emerged from theirs; we build on their heritage and transform their resilience and competence into our own.”

— Regina Barreca

On an aged built-in shelf, among glass plates, gilded cutlery, and ornate serving dishes, sits a nearly 150-year old tea set. The story of how I came to be in possession of such a treasure is one of admiration and respect, grief and acceptance, joy and Love. It is sweet, simple, and perfectly ordinary. And it is more. For the attentive and discerning, there are all the heroines and heroes, goddesses and gods, legendary battles, and brave rescues of any epic tale, and even a quest to save the world that spans generations.

Antique tea set by Ali Ramazan Çiftçi

My grandmother left us in every way that mattered at the beginning of the pandemic but I didn’t really understand that at the time. A stroke coupled with the isolation of lock-downs took their toll on her mind, but she still moved through life, body intact; and her mere breath was enough to ground an entire family. When it became clear she and my grandfather would need more support, they were moved to an assisted living facility and their house of over 30 years was sold quickly. Most of their material possessions – those things they had chosen to color their nearly century long lives – were boxed, sold, donated, or thrown away.

But the intangible things - the things that really matter, the things that had been built on a foundation of Love and moved with care through the rest of us – remained. My grandmother had been the chief builder. Aunts and uncles, nieces and nephews, cousins and second cousins came and went, sorted and packed, and did what they could to support the transition. There was a season of impromptu family reunions during this time. Stories were told to captive audiences. Childhood songs were sung in full harmony, the nostalgia somehow rubbing off on even those who were not part of the original chorus. My little ones were swept up in the arms of older cousins who showed them games, told them jokes, and taught them their lineage all the while. All held a sick aunt just a little closer and gazed at her just a little longer. There was palpable laughter and unspoken sadness and family in motion. We moved like a procession of butterflies, journeying from north to south and back again - the journey so rich with sights and sounds, living and dying, becoming and evermore becoming, as to be the real destination.

During one such visit days before my grandmother’s house was to be sold, I stepped inside and was struck by quiet that was almost touchable. There was no coming and going, no busy and bustle, not even distant laughter or conversation. Or perhaps I had tuned it all out. I walked slowly into the foyer, placing hands and feet where my grandmother’s had been thousands of times. I looked at pictures and little knick-knacks on a small table near the front door and felt life as a kind of prayer. And then I saw her dishes. They seemed suspended in time and space, displayed with her signature precision and care, speaking of the family they had been used to cultivate, unrelentingly bearing witness to everything good and true and real about her.

My grandmother often created Love out of thin air and she had an arsenal of tools to help her - a sewing machine, apple pies, idioms and familiar expressions, spiritual wisdom, ways of organizing and managing day to day, near obsessive cleanliness, and certainly her dishes. As I stood there, I had visions of Thanksgiving dinners and birthday celebrations with laughs around my table. I could see Tuesday teas with my daughters, blueberry muffins in serving dishes embellished with gold, and little hands holding tiny tea cups. I could see myself practicing the art of gluten free pie making using my grandmother’s pie pan (not sure how she would feel about the gluten free part). All of this unfolded in an instant. I had the thought of something important being lost, something that needed to be saved, and whether it was something of the past or the future, I didn’t know. None of it really registered in my conscious awareness at the time. I only felt urgency. “We can’t leave them,” I cried to my mother, reality coming back into focus.

My mother sensed my agitation and we grabbed boxes and began to pack. My daughters watched, understanding more and more Love, animated by Life, with each dish placed into the boxes. We packed most of the serving bowls, trays, silverware, and tablecloths from a stately china cabinet, and as soon as I took a sigh of relief, my mother and I realized we had just begun. Scores of dishes sat neatly in kitchen cabinetry, the old tea set among them. I packed and packed, in a frenzy to squeeze as many dishes in the car as would fit. Somewhere along the way, I began to cry, the overwhelm of the moment just too much for me, the weight of all the Love of this woman bearing down on me. I grasped and held every memory I could with every plate, every glass, and every tray I wrapped. “What’s wrong?” my daughters fretted with furrowed little brows. “She’s saying good-bye,” my mother said softly, understanding more than I did.

My grandmother passed away, this time in body and presence, very shortly thereafter. Grief is an interesting thing in that you can acutely feel the pain of deep loss and yet you can still hold joy. It shows us just how big we are. I have so much joy and gratitude for this woman I grew so close to over the years. I have learned so much about how to be, how to walk in the world with grace and dignity, how to live in Love. I have learned about commitment to creating a little piece of Life that is mine and making it as beautiful as I can. And I have learned about bringing others with me, not through force of will, but through steadfastly holding the truth of who they are, even when they cannot hold it themselves.

Since then, beautiful this and lovely that have made their way into my old cabinetry, joining the dishes of my other grandmother. I have had tea with my daughters using the old tea set, teaching them reverence with each “be careful.” And I have stepped more and more into my name – Eileen, shining Light – a name I inherited from her long before I somehow inherited her dishes, a name passed in form to one daughter and in substance to the other. I have come to understand that while my pies will be imperfect and I will never sew suits without a pattern, her real legacy is the Love she mixed with granules of sugar and infused in spools of thread. And I can meet her there – in kissing the flour-covered faces of my girls as they help me bake, in ironing patches on little pants, in sipping tea in reverie at an old tea set, and in all the little things done in perfectly perfect Love.

Black Love

“Black love is Black wealth and they’ll
probably talk about my hard childhood
and never understand that
all the while I was quite happy”

— Nikki Giovanni, Nikki-Rosa

Black heart by Bryan Garces

Did you know that George Washington Carver discovered hundreds of uses for peanuts, or that Frederick Douglass was a prominent figure in the abolitionist movement, or that Jackie Robinson was the first Black person to play in Major League baseball? Probably. I think these and many, many other figures in Black history, American history, are incredibly important, their contributions meaningful and so very significant. I can't help but wonder, though, if sharing a list of facts, as has been the Black History month custom since time immemorial, or keeping our reveries focused on a select few actually celebrates the beauty and richness of a culture, its depths and complexities.

I suppose I'm also interested, perhaps more interested, in whether their families broke out into full harmony when singing even "Happy Birthday" to a loved one, like mine does? Was weekly church service an event around which all other activities orbited, like it was in my family - where one's best clothes were worn and complimentary dinners were made and served on white tablecloths with special glassware, where the eldest man said prayer among held hands and bowed heads before anyone sat down to eat and share stories? Could their grandmothers wield an otherworldly kind of confidence and create safety and belonging with pies and cakes, and did they carry culture and pass it down in the most subtle ways to their female heirs, like mine could and did? Where did their ever present dignity come from?

I wish Black history museums curated stories of freedom alongside their many stories of slavery. I wish they talked about choirs and music and dance, about the style of Black pastors. I wish they discussed how hip-hop rose from a musical and cultural legacy of self-expression, and even joy, within hardship. I wish they celebrated textured hair and what its evolution may say about the state of an entire people; or how Black girl magic might very well be a thing - woven together, in no small part, from the character-building patience and fortitude required for routine hair care, and the conversation and community-building that happens all the while. I wish a visit would yield a deeper understanding of how language and culture have morphed and evolved, what lovely things remain, and what things have changed as a result of the diaspora, because I’d sincerely like to know more.

Mostly I'd like the evidence to confirm, to bring to life and living color, something I know to be true: Love never dies. It remains. It endures. It will find a way. There is so much beauty, so much richness in Black culture, so much to be celebrated. I invite us all to go a little deeper - to highlight the threads that are unique, to find the ones that are shared, and to celebrate them all as part of a wondrous human tapestry.

Valentine’s Day: Away from B.S. and Back to Basics

“Love is the reason for everything. ”

— Aimee, Collateral Beauty

Guys, I have been seriously struggling with what the heck to post for Valentine’s Day and it makes no sense at all. I am the biggest romantic of all time. Truth. Trust me. I love hearts and bubbles and butterflies and rainbows and moon beams and all things pretty. For all intents and purposes, Valentine’s Day should be my holiday. Toward the end of last year, before shit got real and I had to put pen to paper, I timed the Life and Lovely Things re-introduction to the public for Valentine’s Day. Seemed like a perfect time given the obvious synergies between the brand and the holiday. And yet here I am…without the words I thought I would have.

Blank screen by rawpixel

So here are the words I do have. Turns out, universal Love Day has slowly but surely crept into company with other once magical, now sad holidays that require obligatory actions and provide little meaning in return. It began with the legend of St. Valentine marrying soldiers in defiance of the head of state who thought married soldiers were bad for war. Said St. V was thrown in jail, where he fell in love with the daughter of the jailer, writing her a love letter signed “from your Valentine.” Doesn’t that make you just want to swoon? Here we are nearly two thousand years later, buying high-fructose corn syrup-laden chocolate and cheesy cards. How did we get here?

Wine glasses and bouquet of roses by rawpixel

If you buy into the hype, one of two scenarios generally happens on Valentine’s Day. Scenario One. You and your mate are love-struck. You go out all the time. You do things together. You don’t have crumb snatchers or if you do, you have magically managed to keep your relationship a priority and tend to it as such. V-Day ensues and you – get this – go out, do something together. Well, yeah, but you do that anyway because you’re love-struck, remember? You two follow the prescribed list of stale to-do’s put forth by the powers that be but you secretly wonder why you’re doing it. We don’t need these things to share our love. Nothing about them is special, you think.

Scenario Two: You and significant other are not exactly connected. Significant other buys obligatory flowers, a card, and chocolate. You then act surprised when you get said flowers, card, and chocolate. The two of you go out on a date and you mentally prepare yourself to have sex afterward. The stupid thing is that you actually love significant other but rather than use V-Day to try to connect with him authentically, you follow the same prescribed list of stale to-do’s, which produces a stale result.

I’ve been tethered, at one point or another, to both situations. In either case, I found the forced romance thing to be just damnit dumb. I thought about mentally torching the tradition in its entirety but I am sentimental, after all, and unable to part with any of my holidays. Better minds prevailed and instead, I added it to my chart. What is my chart, you ask? I’d love to share! I created a Powerpoint chart (because what else would a neurotic ex-corporate marketer use) of holidays, what they mean to me at their core, and how I can revamp them to make them more authentic. Like many other things in my life, I’ve taken to basically blowing up my holidays, keeping the good bits, tossing the rest, and adding some stuff to make them more meaningful to ME.

Let me know what you think of this. What if V-Day was less about romance and more about DEEP appreciation. Romance, after all, is more of an effect of the appreciation and admiration we have for another person to which we also happen to be attracted. It’s more of a symptom, a by-product, and therefore it can’t really be manufactured in isolation.

With this slight mental shift, I started to get really excited. I started thinking about all the things I truly appreciate and not just about my mister but about my children, my extended family, myself, and my work. I came across a note I had written to my family some time ago, shortly after the birth of my premature daughter. I read it, I cried, I sent it and I savored every response. I started to think about some of the ways I could combine the things I appreciated. Love of beautiful children meets love of beautiful food and a beautiful V-Day breakfast idea complete with heart-shaped pancakes, sparkling cider flutes, and rose petals was born. (See my lovely list of V-day activities for more and I’ll let you know how it turns out.) I took some time to appreciate my husband – his quirks and qualities - and realized the mad dash to Walgreen’s for a hallmark card isn’t necessary. We’re all good. French fries, drinks at a bar, and simply enjoying each other’s company in the great metropolis of Dayton, Ohio is just perfect (grandma lives in Dayton…when you have tiny beans, you take what you can get).

Yes, deep appreciation. That’s what this holiday means to me going forward. Valentine’s Day provides an opportunity to stop and appreciate. Appreciate until tears fall. Appreciate until your heart cracks open. Appreciate until all you see is Love – real, genuine, authentic Love. I want that for you and I want that for me.

Torn heart by Kelly Sikkema

Love in all things,

April Eileen

P.S. Don’t forget to check out my other V-day posts - What’s Lovely on Valentine’s Day and February’s Quotes from the Classics - for more love!