"Take them," my Grandmother sadly smiles shoving them across the table.
I don't recall if it was at that moment or not that I actually did take them. I may have though they were full of salt and pepper at the time so I doubt it. There's a nagging recollection of my Aunt Bootsie or Mom handing them to me after Grandma died.
Regardless, all these years later, a tangible memento of the crazy love I still have for Ira and Edith Carver, remains mine.
Che dropped the salt shaker a few weeks ago and now it leans like the Tower of Pisa.
"Broken but still functioning," I pronounce when she does it, "just like me."
Our Love child stares at me for a moment and two huge moon eyes filled with blue oceans melts my heart before she turns them back to "Toca World" on her IPad.
I've loved these simple connections to an important part of who I am and how much I adored my grandparents!
The girls have used the cafe style shakers for years without giving them any thought as did the older kids before them.
Sarah knows they're precious to me.
Mom knows I have them and she can't quite recall exactly how I actually got them either.
"She just gave them to you one day," Mom explains. 'She knew you loved them."
It's true I do.
Decades ago they rested on top of a black and white, cloth, checkered tablecloth at a two seat kitchen table where there was always coffee.
It's still the "homiest" Norman Rockwell feeling I can conjure and sometimes, I feel the memory of it again holding these relics to the past.
Ira and Edith believed the Bible with everything in them, especially the part about "being fruitful and multiplying." Lord knows they were good at it and there's a gazillion Carver's in the world so they'll always be a home for them somewhere.
Edith and Ira still love me because sometimes I feel them as real as if I were sitting at the little kitchen table having endless cups of coffee kept heated on the gas stove.
I don't know why I feel this way sometimes.
Or when or how but sometimes, I get so caught up in it, moments suddenly seem like years and though I'm sitting at our dining room table, I'm really somewhere else, some other Universe, a different time and space.
"It's a tiny glimpse into what's coming next," I can hear my recently deceased favorite author Frederick Buechner saying, though he didn't.
Who knows?
I don't.
But it's a nice thought.
And I can't remember what I said to Grandma that day when she told me to take them.
Her passing is so fuzzy to me because I was so busy then.
So if I didn't say thank you, I'm doing it now Grandma.
Thank you for loaning them to me.
