As I was scrolling through Facebook the other day, I noticed one of my friends had posted a picture of a wooden spoon. He was cleaning out some drawers in his kitchen, and there it was.
“Its scoop has been leveled by time. It’s cracked, discolored and completely worn,” he wrote. He thought about throwing it out. But the spoon had belonged to his grandmother. So he put it back in the drawer.
I once had a spoon just like that. It had also originally belonged to my grandmother. It, too, was chipped, discolored and worn completely smooth. As I recall, it even had a burn scar on the handle where someone had perhaps left it sitting too close to the stove’s flame. My brother’s girlfriend’s 3 year old used to call it “the ugly spoon.”
It had survived decades of use stirring spaghetti sauces, puddings, Betty Crocker cake mixes, egg custards, hamburger soups. It eventually was passed on to my mother. An excellent cook, she continued on with its intended use. And also its less-intended use: as a corporal threat to misbehaving children, namely my brother and sister and me. “Do I have to get the spoon?” she’d yell when we were being especially naughty.
My mother never actually had to deploy the spoon in this fashion. The mere rattle of the utensil drawer was enough to stop us in our tracks. Still, when it came to us kids and the wooden spoon, we were taking no chances.
One time, my parents were away and my grandmother came to stay with us. We heard her in the kitchen at dinner time, opening and closing all the drawers. My siblings and I were in the family room watching cartoons when she called out, “Where the hell does your mother keep the wooden spoons?” We stared blankly at the TV set, sitting crosslegged on the old couch, our little bodies weighing down the cushions like sacks of potatoes.
Years later, the wooden spoon was unearthed from the deep, dark couch crevasses, where it had been laid to rest among ancient Cap’n Crunch crumbs, ballpoint pen caps, wadded Kleenex and loose pennies. Not long after this act of accidental archaeology, the spoon was passed on to me.
I promised the wooden spoon a full and happy return to its former life stirring sauces, soups and hot, mulled wine. And when it wasn’t in use, it enjoyed many peaceful hours of big-spooning in a cozy drawer.
After I downsized from a 3,600-square-foot house to a 600-square-foot apartment, I lovingly packed up the wooden spoon, along with a few other special serving pieces that came from my mother and grandmother.
But then, when I moved to Park City, and I had to downsize again, I was only taking what could fit in my car, so I had to be brutally selective. There was no room for nostalgia. I could buy shiny, new utensils for my shiny new life. The ugly spoon had to go.
The other day, as I prepared a Thanksgiving dish to pass, I poured a box of Jiffy corn muffin mix into a big, silver bowl. I cracked in two eggs, added two cans of corn, some sour cream and a stick of melted butter. I reached for a wooden spoon. Not the wooden spoon, of course. But it stirred up memories just the same.