SURVIVOR

Orphans and only children hold on
to little objects once owned by dead
people they loved, or relatives they think
would have loved them, if. That person
who bequeathed that cherished thing entrusted it

to be watched over or treasured by its caretaker.
The object holds the love of both.
This is the story of a sugar bowl I own.
It belonged to my great great aunt who saved my grandmother
when she fell ill with typhoid fever.

My grandfather and his four small children needed
care and feeding while she suffered. Being told not
to expect her to live, her aunt Effie, a convert to Christian Science,
came to help. She spent the interval between prayers, reading
aloud to the family from the texts of Mary Baker Eddy.

The miracle of the story was that my grandmother (Mam-ma) recovered.
She credited the faith of Effie, her dead mother’s sister
with her return to health but she did not adopt her faith.
Yet the story of the sugar bowl she inherited is much older.
Apparently its tale began in Bavaria, the home of both my mother’s

maternal grandfather (and by co-incidence 
my father’s paternal grandfather). The sugar bowl is marked with that name;
decorated with blue-violet hydrangeas which 
became Mam-ma’s favorite, (she spent much intense
time trying to cultivate them in the hostile Texas panhandle).

Molly Clifton Holley had been orphaned before she was one.
She’d been left in the care of her mother’s mother known to me
as Granny Donnell who’d opened the Oklahoma territory
emigrating from northern Ireland with two daughters; losing her husband
on the way. She’d staked a claim next to a family named Counts

who had four boys near enough in age to her two girls.
The sugar bowl belonged to the Bavarian Counts
family and was likely a wedding gift to a young emigrating couple,
packed safely for their voyage to the new world and eventually Indian Territory.
Its first miracle is that it survived that trip, the second surviving the

boisterous youth of their four young men. A tribute to the value
Mrs. Counts placed on the object, no doubt. Yet it shows
that through the years, it was prized not only for its shape and 
translucence but for its true utility as well.

I surmise when Clifton’s mother, Mary, married Tom Counts,
it was given to her by her new mother-in-law.
Sadly, she and Tom succumbed at a very early age
to the flu, leaving a baby girl and two toddling boys. By all accounts
the sugar bowl passed on to Mary’s sister Effie (probably when

she married Buford Sewell) and was in her care for sixteen
years until the young Molly Clifton married Ernest Holley
and set out on her own newly married adventure.
These bits and pieces I heard while drying dishes, being keen
not to break anything or tap a precious plate or cup.

For a while after Molly Clifton's death, it resided
in a breakfront in my mother's house which they shared
until Mam-ma's death at eighty-four. And there I found it
when clearing things after my own mother (Dorothy Holley Reiser) died.
I don't recall its ever having been in use for the iced tea or coffee

or sprinkling strawberries or countless other sugar dispensaries.
Mam-ma or Mother used another sugar bowl through the years.
I believed its sentimental attachment made it something kept unused.
In fact, I'd never even peered inside until last night – and was surprised to find it dirty.
Both the rim and deep inside were etched with a few areas of sand.

I believe that it was left there to tell its own last miraculous saga.
The reality of having made its way through the great dust bowl of the thirties,
a time when food and money were scarce; when dirt-filled every container,

even this one –precious to generations, simply decorated, this once-pure sugar bowl. 

Now it's history and whether or not it has more depends on you.

© Gay Reiser Cannon * 1/16/2013 * All Rights Reserved
This note to be left as provenance with the sugar bowl.