Small objects of memory
I drink tea every day. I love the ritual of it: boil the water, cover the leaves, the enforced wait of steeping time, remove the leaves or the tea bag, and another wait until it's cool enough to drink.
The last time I saw my parents in their home was in June 2023. My mother gave me her mother's sugar tongs, and I use them to get the tea bag out of my tea. I have always thought sugar tongs and sugar cubes are the height of poshness, and I love using these. I wonder how often my grandmother used them. She did keep sugar cubes in her house in a glass bowl and I was so impressed by them.
I use loose-leaf tea most of the time, but my daily cuppa is a Yorkshire Gold tea bag, so I can use these tongs. Once I've removed the tea bag, I wash the tongs off and put them back in a silver Reed and Barton sugar bowl, with a few other precious utensils. One is a tea spoon I got in Covent Garden market while visiting Jessica in 2018 on the back end of a work trip to London. It's a well-used spoon, she helped me pick it out, and we visited the History Museum afterwards. I watched her dust off a piece of ancient Egyptian statuary, convinced we were going to be chased out of the museum for touching something so old, but nothing happened and we went giggling out of the museum to find coffee and lunch. I got a pocket mirror in the museum gift shop ("There's always a little shop", Doctor Who) that lives in my handbag with a Turkish design on the back. I do love a little shop.
Mum also gave me her baking spoon, a jumbo-sized metal spoon. The design is more ornate and flowery than the jumbo-sized baking fork I took with me to university. We found the fork in a wooden trunk in the attic of our house in Ipswich when we moved in, it's engraved with "I. Poett" on the back, presumably the name of the owner. I use the fork and spoon for mixing batter for scones and muffins. I don't know how old these pieces are, but I assume they are all older than I am. I had to clean the spoon with a toothpick, baking powder, and finally a white vinegar soak to remove embedded pieces of dirt from the pattern. It wasn't a great design choice for a working piece of cutlery, but cooking with pieces of history makes me happy. I can keep it clean.
My kitchen, and my house, is full of these little pieces that spark memories of friends, visits, conversations, laughter, food and drink, happy times.
The last time I saw my mother was August 2025, after a stroke. She died in November 2025. I use the sugar tongs she gave me every day.