Extremely useful bowl, in the then popular Danish modern style. In the fifty years its been in the family, it mixed innumerable cake batters and doughs, dips and crusts. Lots of bowls of buttered popcorn, and played utility for cleaning messes.
It's held floor mop water, animal wastes and a fair amount of vomit.
It's done sponge baths and cleaning water and, most recently, drinking water for dogs.
Took it all in cheerful stride. Always available for a job. Always under the sink or up in a cupboard.
Cleaning out my dead parent's house, the family home since 1973, it's one of the very few things that I sought out.
That first year I made everyone fruitcake. Staying up for a couple of days straight to bake and mix and wrap the little bastards in cheese cloth before their month long brandy soak... They were mixed there. The cheese cakes mom baked, lots of chex mix. All my memories of cooking, really, are part of the goddamned bowl.
Which, today, started to leak.
It's gone utility senile. Not at all fit for what it was designed and made for. Or for any of the thousands of things that it has done, for so long, for my family.
Throw it out? It's just a broken tool, a bowl that cannot be used.
I'll drink your favourite child's blood before that happens.
I'll use it to hold my kitchen tools, I think. Replacing the various cannisters. I'll probably do it tonight, a suitable retirement.
Not yet. For a little while, it can just rest. With the gratitude of a lifetime's use embodied.
