TOO MANY PLATES

It took an outbreak of termites in my storage closets for me to realize I was the owner of 250 assorted plates.

This was not always the case. When we moved into this house in 1980, we didn’t have much of anything. To get us started then, I had bought a stack of white plates, neutral enough to be used for every day and for the parties that we planned to throw. 

My parents had loved to throw parties, and were not concerned about being too correct, nor were they about to spend a lot of money, when less would do. For this reason, perhaps, their parties were always very lively, and people relaxed. I remember them dancing wildly in our cleared dining room to Bill Haley’s newly released “Rock around the Clock,” a doctor friend with a trickle of blood running down his forehead from having bumped into the low hanging chandelier. We lived in a beautiful big house, and no one minded that the wine was pretty basic, and the simple food cooked by my mother. And they had plenty of plates, for my father was an avid scouter of “antiques,” which he found in small dark stores in the old parts of Copenhagen.

 

Decades later in Rio de Janeiro we had to get creative for our housewarming party, a mere month after having moved in. At some point the lights went out and in the total dark we remembered the dozens of empty beer bottles left behind by the previous owners and rushed to jam candles into them. Despite the lingering smell of stale beer it looked quite romantic, until the lights came back on and there were dusty brown bottles all over the place. Still, it didn’t matter. It was Carnival time and my mother-in-law had brought an LP with the latest samba school music, to which we danced and sang.

 

In the course of our first 10 years in the house, the humble white plates saw plenty of action in animated parties with home-cooked food and pretty basic wine. Then, when my mother-in-law passed away, we inherited her two full sets of china – for she too had hosted big parties – and when my mother left us in 2000, her three sets of plates made the long voyage from Denmark to join the many plates already here. I stacked them in my cupboards and used some sporadically when I had an idea for setting a table or needed to feed many people

 

Our large parties eventually petered out and the plates were forgotten until Loki, our German Shepherd puppy, pressed his curious nose into a half-open cupboard and got it covered in spiderwebs. I decided to do a major cleanup and to my horror found termites had been quietly working in the back of the cupboards, behind the plates. 

 

Faced with the newly cleaned piles, and aware of the assorted matching serving dishes tucked away in other cupboards - and which I will never use – I pondered what to do. The plates carry memories of past joyful moments, of parties, of laughter, of our parents and grandparents in happy times. We are the keepers of those memories and therefore we cannot just get rid of the plates.

 

I took a long look at my stacks and decided to donate the white plates that had served us so well. They will be useful for other families. Meanwhile, my mother’s and my mother-in-law’s pretty plates, with their carefully chosen colors and motifs, have been returned to their place in the newly clean cupboards.