The Cooking Pot

The Cooking Pot

For the longest time after she died, I kept my mother’s cooking pot—the one in which for 50 years she made roast beef, or boiled ham, or stewed chicken. It was oval in shape, heavy as a cannon ball, and dull gray on the outside. It’s hard to way what the inside color was. No particular color really, more like the absence of color—sort of a blackish, brownish, navy-ish, absorption of light. The lid, also heavy and made of the same material, have a smooth curvy shape, like one of the paper-mache hills you make in third grade, with a perfect finger hole at the very top.

By the time I inherited the pot, parts of the bottom inside surface had been eaten away, either by vigorous stirring and jabbing over the years or maybe by chemical decomposition from the flavorful broths that simmered there. Because of that, I was never willing to use the pot as it was intended, but for a long time I used the bottom as a holder for some artificial ivy that I had covering a bare corner in my dining room.

When I moved here, though, I gave the pot to Goodwill. It was hard to part with something that was my mother’s, but I have so many other things that were hers, it isn’t like I have lost all my memory triggers.

And yet, that cooking pot lingers in my memory. It has come to symbolize so much that was my mother. The way she never replaced anything until it was truly broken or worn out. Buying something just to have a new version was beyond her comprehension. Having more than one of anything was wasteful to her. And replacing an old and cherished utensil with one that had no memories would have seemed to her like burying a piece of her past. So, for the entire lifetime we spent together on this Earth, that cooking pot was THE cooking pot used in Mama’s kitchen.