Taking Down the Fiesta Ware

      The call came last night.  It was the Salvation Army lady.  Did I have anything discarded that was useful to give them?  I said yes and hung up the phone.  In the guest bedroom on a closet shelf rested for several years my treasured Fiesta Ware.  I was using it daily ever since my mother had handed it down to me.  It was her one purchase during the "war years" that had survived and needed to be preserved and protected, if only for its endurance.  But my son-in-law had cautioned me after a meal at my house that this was too valuable to keep using day to day.  I really should set it aside and use something else.  So I had wrapped the pieces in tissue to please him.

     Now I asked my daughter, she who lives in a Mies Van der Rhoe high-rise, if she would like the set someday.  "Well, I do have the Eva Zeisel collection," she said.  "I'm not sure we'd have the room."  I thought about their furnishings: the Eames chairs, the Macintosh table, the 1930s lamps.  Even Frank Lloyd Wright didn't make the cut.  I knew my Fiesta Ware couldn't expect to either.

     Just to remind myself of its value, I pulled the cardboard box down from the shelf and peered into it  Red, blue, green, yellow and aqua were the basic colors.  The set wasn't complete due to various mishaps over the years, but I slid the pieces out one by one, carefully turning them around to examine them.  The blue gravy boat was a favorite, along with the green round salt and pepper shakers.  I remembered them on my mother's table in the small bungalow house in Indiana.  She was especially proud of the red plate because they had stopped making red during the war.  I even had an old Polaroid photo of my parents sitting at the metal-edged table in the kitchen with the plates spread around, waiting for company.  The surface of each plate was marred with years of fork scraping but I liked that.  It was proof of their usefulness.  They had been faithful; they had served; they had survived.

      I couldn't part with them yet.  I made a note to myself to call the Salvation Army lady.  They would have to wait a few years for the donation.