0258 While The Enamel Holds

I've just made a passable loaf: the mixing bowl could almost be called a Thanksgiving Bowl - maybe, could start a fashion: it's made, not of catering-trade steel which spins nicely on the worktop nor of plastic, but of enamel, made about 1929 I guess, by Kockums of Sweden, size 28 cms it's clearly stamped - Kockum's whose proud claim is that 'it lasts a lifetime' - if you're fortunate enough to be able to test it thus... my mother used it to make cakes - I can hear the scratch of sugar, butter, flour, right now; sometimes the smell of lemon or vanilla too. And for her, too, gratitude, I guess, while she used it, hands and thoughts, although she could not put it to the Kockum's test...But the silvery marks of the fork, or whisk, or careful knife that left little for me to lick, disappeared from its strong enamel and now I use it to make bread wondering how many of the current users could verify to Kockum's management their proud claim for it was only late in life that my mother told me that this bowl this small 28 cm bowl was my first baby bath so as I use it with these mixed emotions mixed together in this mixing bowl receptacle of love on love and thanksgiving I note with some reflection that recently, one slight chip in its circular bowl has appeared due perhaps to carelessness, not in the preparing but the washing-up... and think I'd rather think (you see - the baby turned out intellectual) my life were rounded by my failures in my care than the life of an enamel bowl however guaranteed perhaps we'll go together... dust to dust, flour to flour, flowers falling to nourish the seeds of flowers to come I must remember to ask my executors to write Kockum's and confirm their not so often substantiated claim