Dishes and Memories

Opal Harrison is getting out her grandmother's dishes this morning.

This afternoon she'll go to the ecumenical Good Friday service at The Whistle & Thistle Biker Bar and Tea Room. When the weather is good, the service is held in the John Jacob Niles Memorial Grove behind the W&T. Bad weather backup this year is the auditorium of the Borden Parker Bowne Personalist Center. Nobody expects bad weather, though, so Bob Whistle and the members of the Jesus Honor Guard Biker Gang, Inc. have been putting up the three crosses in the ampitheater, where generations of high school students, trying to imitate that high lonesome sound of Niles, have irrevently sung "Black, black, black is the color of my love's true hair."

This morning, though, Opal is getting ready for Easter dinner, and that means her grandmother's dishes. Her grandmother was born in 1883, and she received her wedding china in 1902. It was some of the first china produced by the Crooksville China Company, of Crooksville, OH, which was established that very year.

That Apple Blssom pattern china has been used on Easter Sunday for 108 years, including all the years since Opal inherited it from her mother. Each year, she tries to get one of her daughters, or the wives of one of her grandsons, to take the dishes.

It's especially important this year, to get someone to take those dishes, for this summer she and Al have to move into the assisted living wing of The Blau Harr Home for Dessert Years Living. Their apartment has a great view of the parking lot of The Startled Muskrat IGA, so that she can keep up with the comings and goings of the town, but it has no room for storing things like her grandmother's dishes.

Opal understands why no one in her family will take the dishes. They don't have enough room, or they have their own wedding china, or...there are a lot of excuses, and even some reasons. But these aren't just dishes. They are 108 years of family memories, and the hopes for the future that apple blossoms always bring.

Opal is thinking that perhaps this afternoon she'll ask Edith Whistle if she would like to have those dishes to use in the bar. After all, the folks who eat there could use some better memories and some apple blossom hopes.