Flashbacks come at the oddest of times, triggered by the smallest of details.
I was at the sink of the Aqua RV, where I keep a small, white, maybe fifteen-inch-in-diameter round, plastic-type dish pan. If I recall correctly, I think it was initially designed to be a food container with a snap-over lid but we bought it to use as a dish pan and discarded the lid long ago. I have used this pan for a multitude of purposes, hundreds of times over the past five-plus years and never had a flashback to my maternal grandmother, "Nana", as I called her - or my mom, but today was different.
Preparing potatoes to use in potato salad, I took the pan from the sink and moved it to a nearby table that was a bit lower and easier for this short person to peel "taters" over. Just that action and the subsequent motions of peeling spuds took me back to a time long ago, somewhere in my sub-conscious. Suddenly I was transported to my childhood, into a 1950's kitchen, where there was no running water and most certainly no garbage disposal. The kind of kitchen where all of the garbage was collected in white, probably porcelain pans, later to be tossed out over a garden, into a pig pen, or onto rich, black farmland soil. This task would take place on multiple occasions during the course of a day as Nana and my mother cooked for my dad, myself, and the other farm laborers who would be fed a large, mid-day meal.
How many times this scenario played out during my younger years I cannot accurately state, but I do remember being the little "gopher" whose job it was to carry out the garbage and toss it wherever I was instructed, as far as my little arms could throw the white pan's contents. I always felt important being the "garbage heaver" because after I'd accomplished my task, I would frolic a bit with the kittens, rub the noses of the calves, sneak a fistful of raspberries, or chase a butterfly or two.
Those were good days. I still had two of my umbilical chords......Nana and my mother. Today my connection with them was re-established, even if just briefly, by a fifteen-inch plastic pan used to collect potato peelings. How strangely wonderful.
Thank you, God.
Ancora imparo
