When I was growing up, we had this strange looking silverware. The silverware didn’t look at all like the silverware I saw in my picture books. The forks had very small tines, the knives had no sharp edges and the spoons were very shallow and not quite round. What I loved the most were the long slender “iced tea” spoons. I used them anytime I could.
One Christmas, I was helping my mother get extra silverware out for a party, and ran across the spoons. I told her how I’d always loved them and how I’d never seen silverware that had spoons even remotely like them. That is when I learned that their official name was “iced tea spoons” and that’s when she gave them to me, all four of them.
I used the spoons happily for years. They are great for getting yogurt out of the plastic containers; they are fun to eat ice cream with; they are great for stirring tall glasses of liquid. I always enjoy showing them to new people. A number of my friends now covet these spoons.
That got me thinking. I started to look up “iced tea spoons” on the internet. I looked through so many versions of “iced tea spoons” and never found ones that looked like mine. My four spoons became even more precious. I told my mother about this search of mine one day. She remembered the name of the silverware, which was a really great clue to finding them on the internet. I tried to find a few more so that I wouldn’t worry about how awful it would be to lose one.
It was, of course, a discontinued model. So, I started looking on e-bay. My birthday was a few months away, and my sister is often looking for ideas. I figured she might like to have something very specific this year, so I suggested that to my mother, the keeper of all wish lists in the family. I had to explain to my mother what e-bay was.
By the time my birthday came around, I had forgotten all about them. When my mother handed me a present expecting that I knew exactly what was in it, I really had no clue. It was such a wonderful surprise to find 6 more of these precious spoons!
The spoons are special to me. But, more than the spoons, it’s what my mother had to do to get them. My mother who uses her computer for e-mail and games, who calls me to help her use search engines, managed to figure out e-bay. She actually bid on and won the spoons! Then she had to figure out how to pay for them over the internet. My mother figured all this out because she wanted to be the one to give me the spoons. She wanted to make sure I got them. That was the really big surprise for me. That meant so much to me.
I know it’s a little weird to be so happy about some spoons. I can’t tell you which spoons are from my childhood and which ones my mother went way out of her way to find. But that doesn’t matter. All of them came from my mom. When I open the silverware drawer I see the spoons and I remember that I am loved.