Wednesday, April 17, 2013

About Cream Pitchers and the Cruelist Month

It's funny how something like a little stainless cream pitcher on a restaurant table can open a floodgate of memories on a cold April Day. My friend Kathy who died of breast cancer in April of 1979 judged restaurants by how they served the cream for her coffee. Those little plastic containers just didn't do it for her but she would have approved of this charming pitcher and I smiled at this memory of her when the waiter set it down. 

We were both young brides when Kathy and I became friends and it was clear her upbringing had better prepared her for the kind of domestic life we were both aspiring to. She knew about fine china and furniture periods and decorating styles, how to set a table and get all those forks from our wedding silver (hers for real, mine silver plate) in the right place. From watching her I learned about napkin rings and placemats (none ever graced my family's table) as well as hostess towels in the bathroom and a crystal candy dish in the living room. I didn't know what it was when she gave me my first sprigs of bittersweet one Fall day, arranged ever so artfully in a pottery vase.  Since then I have always welcomed Fall by harvesting the bittersweet that now grows abundantly on my back fence, a seasonal reminder of my friend.  I guess I am saying that Kathy was there when I first began to discover my domestic self and she was an early inspiration. I am sad to think again of all I missed in losing my friend so soon.

It was an April morning 34 years ago that she lay dying in her childhood home. She and her young husband had moved there in the last months of her illness so that her mother could help him care for her. It had been a long cold winter just like this one, made even darker by the sad reality of her advancing cancer. And it was a Spring (and I use that term lightly) just like this year. I remember that the snow and cold just wouldn't end and Kathy grew weaker each day, all of us talking about and longing for nicer weather to somehow lift our spirits. And then one gray and gloomy afternoon while I sat with her, she said she was just waiting for Spring to come - she didn't have to say it but I knew she was talking about death and she wanted to see the flowers and hear the birds one last time in her short life. Unlike this year, Punxstawney Phil hadn't called for an early spring but in a way that made me happy because it gave me a few more days with my friend.

Kathy died on April 30 that year and as I recall the days before her death were the first beautiful days of Spring. I remember getting up very early when the call came,  and I went for a run in the bright Spring sun, with the birds chirping and the flowers blooming. It was everything she had been waiting for.