Keepers

After dinner, she washes it by hand,
this plate that cannot go in the dishwasher,
cannot bear another break.

Her fingers know each seam by heart:
the flour-paste scar running north to south
(great-grandmother’s repair, 1945),
the gold vein circling the rim
(grandmother’s work, 1967),
the silver thread near the center
(mother’s, 1998),
the superglue patch, still rough, her own.

Four generations of careful mending,
of women who couldn’t bear to lose
what shattered in their hands.

August 1945:
Her great-grandmother, alone in the kitchen,
rereads the telegram for the third time.
“Missing in action” – those words
that steal the strength from knees.

She reaches for her mother’s wedding gift,
the one with hand-painted roses,
just to hold something
her mother once touched.
When it slips from trembling fingers,
breaks against the linoleum,
she doesn’t cry – she kneels
in the wreckage, gathers every piece.

Two weeks later, when the second telegram
changes everything, when “missing”
becomes “found,” becomes “coming home,”
she’s still mixing flour and water,
still gluing pieces back together.
“For remembering,” she tells her daughter,
“how broken things can still hold
what matters most.”

1967:
Her grandmother teaching her mother,
then five years old,
the proper way to set a table.
Fork on the left, knife and spoon on the right.
“Like soldiers,” she says,
“standing at attention.”

The child carries the plate with both hands,
ceremonial, then trips on nothing,
on air, on being five.

This time grandmother repairs it
with gold paint mixed into store-bought glue,
having read somewhere
about beauty in the breaking.
The little girl cries until she sees the gold,
then traces it with one finger:
“Now it’s fancier.”

1998:
Her mother’s thirty-fifth birthday,
the chocolate cake ambitious, three layers high.
She sets it on the heirloom plate,
carries it singing,
then the dog, the cat, something
shoots between her feet.

Plate cracks, cake slides,
lands sideways but intact,
frosting smeared like abstract art.
They eat it anyway,
forks finding chocolate through the wreckage,
everyone declaring it
the best mistake ever made.

That night, mother traces silver solder
along the newest fracture,
while photos of the tilted cake
join the fridge gallery,
labeled “Birthday Disaster #35.”

Last Saturday:
Reaching for the Scrabble dictionary,
her father’s dissertation comes with it,
twenty years of binding finally letting go.
She juggles paper, book,
knocks the plate from its stand.

The plate survives, barely,
a new crack smiling across its face.
The dissertation falls open to page 247:
“…understanding hte importance…”
That single letter, missing its mark,
the flaw her father could never fix
but couldn’t bear to discard.

She sees it then: how both objects
carry the beautiful imperfections
of the hands that shaped them.
The plate with its history of breaks,
the manuscript with its stubborn typo –
each imperfection a signature,
proof of the human heart
behind the careful work.

Now:
In the kitchen drawer:
superglue, gold paint, silver solder—
tools waiting.
On the shelf: the plate, the dissertation,
side by side.
The fridge hums, holding its gallery.
The smile-shaped crack catches light.

She leaves it there, unrepaired,
this newest break—
not from exhaustion or defeat,
but because this crack
has earned its moment
to simply exist,
to catch the light
and smile back.