Joyce Newcomb

When I was a child, the sky-blue teapot sat on the counter beside the stove until called into service at dinner. My mother brewed tea in it by pouring boiling hot water over two bags of Lipton’s orange pekoe.  After our meal, my parents would linger over their tea, discussing the day’s events, while my two sisters and I waited to be excused from the table.  As the three of us grew older, we joined the conversations, relating not only our triumphs and blunders but offering our opinions on more wide-ranging topics.  Philosophy, religion, politics— nothing was taboo; each opinion considered with respect.  If the teapot ran dry, Mother would brew more tea. Sunday dinners, served on bone china in the dining room after church, were the best. We would sit around the table talking for hours.

That teapot was as much a part of dinner as the conversation. Mother had acquired it during the Great Depression.  Buy a pound of Lipton tea and receive a blue ceramic teapot with the company name molded on the bottom. Wherever my parents set up housekeeping, for fifty-seven years that pot was always on the table. When the time came, after my parents had died, first one and then five years later the other, I brought the blue teapot home with me.

It sits on my desk. The spout is chipped. The lid is missing. A treasure still, the teapot now holds memories.