What I'll Miss
/Rebecca Grossman-Kahn
One summer when I was a teenager, my mother planted three ceramic teacups in our front yard.
They were pink and yellow with a floral design and gold around the rims. Each cup sat centered on
its own saucer, hot glued onto long green stakes that my mother pushed firmly into the earth.
Elegant and shiny, they hovered a few feet in the air, among the roses. “Did you see my teacups?”
she asks when I come home one day. “Aren’t they great?”
I didn’t understand, then, why anyone would plant teacups in a garden. “Are they for holding
candles?” I ask my mom. “Aren’t you supposed to put bird feed inside?”
But she bought them for their form. For the same reason she loves bowls and pitchers. She likes the
feel of her palm around something so delicate and so curved. She collects teapots that sit proudly on
a shelf above the cookbooks. “They have such a great shape,” she reminds me often, when she
pours from their round, fat bottoms. Somehow even at eighteen, I sense that her unbridled delight
in pitchers is what I will miss about her, some day.
Winter comes and the cups gather pools of rainwater and eventually, greenish fuzz. When I come home
from college I tell her it is disgusting. She laughs. Many years later the garden teacups make the cut in a
cross-country move. They get stuck purposefully into new dirt. I see them when I visit, the colors
muted. They are both dirty and half-filled with yard debris. Yet they stand resolute, firmly placed in the
small city garden, calling me home
Authors Note: I wrote this flash nonfiction piece after a trip to visit my parents. I suddenly noticed the garden teacups I grew up with and I saw them in a new light as an adult. I hope readers can relate to themes of growing up, adolescent-parent relationships, home, simple delights, and maybe reflect on the idiosyncrasies of their loved ones that make them smile.
Rebecca Grossman-Kahn is a writer and physician based in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Her essays have appeared in Bellevue Literary Review, The Examined Life Journal, The New England Journal of Medicine, and The Intima. You can find her on Twitter @rebecccacgk or at rebeccagrossmankahn.com.
