“Take something!”

This was request repeated over and over last weekend. After the parental house was shut down, Brother #3 got the burden of our parent’s things, which sit now in boxes in his basement. My ability to take home items thrust upon me was limited by my luggage. I took some old ‘Boy’s Life’ magazines, a box of recipes, and this butter dish:

After Mother died, Father asked what I wanted. I did not go for the china or the paintings or the silverware, What I wanted was this butter dish. It is neither fancy nor valuable. It is made from a sort of plastic that looks as new as when it was first used many decades ago. Its color is a funny shade of green, like an overripe avocado, which was popular back then. It seems to shout ‘I’m from the 70s’.

It’s been a year since I dropped el plato de manteqilla*. That one was made of blue glass which shattered upon impact. We’ve not had a butter dish since. I’ve been holding off getting a new one on the practical and maudlin grounds this one would work nicely.

Simple things like butter dishes are so integral to one’s life yet hardly noticed. Ours sat on the kitchen table for every meal (minus the formal ones) and was witness to the family talks in its countless permutations of passes. There was a time it held butter, then only margarine when butter was declared suspect. Then it went back to butter when it was margarine’s turn to be the bogeyman and we preferred butter anyway. In the passing of said dish there were sometimes voiced opinions of how the recipient ‘uses too much’ or the butter was too hard.  Its cover allowed the dish to stay on the table during the months with “R” in them. This allowed the butter to be sufficiently soft enough for spreading on toast, its chief job then as is now.

This green plastic butter dish presently sits on the kitchen island at La Casa de Spo. It does not go with anything.  Being among the modern kitchenware it looks dated, like a grandmother who brought a Jello-mold dessert to the family Thanksgiving while the younger relations all made Yuppie dishes with foreign names.

I am pleased as Punch to have it; I will think of the many meals it went with over as I ask Someone at supper to please pass it to me.

 

 

*Translation: the butter dish.