The Reindeer Keeper

When growing up and playing in the dining room of my grandparents’ farmhouse with my cousins, I remember being told to be careful of the china cupboard because it held all of my grandmother’s china, including tea cups with matching saucers and serving dishes, as well as plates and silverware kept in a particular box lined with velvet. We were told most everything in that china cupboard was kept for good. When I was a little girl I loved sitting in the middle of my parents’ bed and looking through my mother’s jewelry box covered with-yes again, velvet-midnight blue velvet. Everything in that jewelry box seemed to glisten. Gently touching the strands of jewels and stones and rings that glittered, I felt like a princess getting ready for the ball. But there were a few things I’d been told not to touch, like the long, narrow box holding my mother’s pearls and another holding a cameo brooch with matching earrings my father bought for my mother. I’d been told those pieces were kept for...

Even though we were young, my cousins and I must have realized the china cupboard situtated in a corner of the dining room of the old farmhouse was off limits. I don't remember us talking about it. If we had talked about it I would have remembered because such talks were usually long ones. And I don't remember any adult telling us not to play near the cupboard so it must have been our youthful intuition at work. Oh we played in the dining room all the time. We ran through it, played tag around the oak pedestal table; hid buttons for "Button, Button, Who's Got The Button", laughed and giggled in games of "Red Light-Green Light" and so much more but not once did we venture near that cupboard. Looking back I think it's because we knew it wasn't just any china cupboard. It was our grandmother's china cupboard. The glass doors were only opened on special occasions-including Thanksgiving. When they were, out came bone china dining sets and servin...