In a comment to my Who I Am Post, Piroseper asked about my sweet little teacup.
There are actually three teacups, I just put my favorite in the hodgepodge picture of my life of things.
These teacups were my grandmothers’s.
I remember going to my grandparents’ apartment as a child. They had several apartments while I was growing up, but in each apartment, the set up was always the same. There was a large couch, across from a television set. There was a marble coffee table in front of the couch, in the shape of an S, and on each end of the couch, there were cherry wood end tables. On each end table was a scary looking lamp, with a gargoyle carved in the marble just below the light fixture. And, as ugly as these lamps were, that’s how beautiful the teacups looked, resting on the top of the tables. There were six cups, and when my grandparents passed away, my mother and I split them up. I have three cups, my mother has three.
My grandmother came to this country from England. She, her parents, her sister, and her two brothers first settled in Canada, where the first wave of the family had moved. But, there were no jobs, and the boys found themselves across the border in Detroit, finding jobs in the auto industry. My grandmother often visited them, and 
during one visit, at a vintage keg party, she met my grandfather, and it was not long after that she married him.
She moved to Philadelphia. A brother and his family, and various cousins stayed in Canada. Another brother moved back to England, and I still have family there, as well. And, even though the family found itself on different continents, in different countries, they stayed close, visiting when they could. And these teacups were sentimental gifts that were given to my grandmother when she would visit. I wish, when she were alive, I had asked her about the teacups – about which teacup was gifted on what visit. There are pictures of my mom with her Canadian cousins, different summers, different hairstyles – which cup went with which summer? At least one of the cups was a gift from her brother, when he visited from England. I don’t know which cup, and neither does my mother.
My grandmother had the loveliest hands. I did not inherit them – I have my father’s small stubby fingers. My grandmother had long, thin fingers, and beatiful nails. At some point, before my mother made me throw them away because they smelled of mothballs, I had a bag of little white gloves that my grandmother would wear to work. When I look at these little cups, I think of her with white gloves, sipping tea.
Not that she actually drank tea out of these cups. In fact, I think she became an Americanized coffee drinker. But, no matter. During the Depression, she didn’t have depression glass, she had these lovely cups. And, when I was growing up, I wasn’t allowed to touch them.
I was always told they weren’t for play, they were special.
