Whether you are a full-time or part-time homemaker, no doubt your daily round includes some cooking, laundry management, and cleaning what shows. As a break from the dailiness of everyday life, I sometimes enjoy doing the seasonal household chores.
Cleaning all the stuff and places that don’t show usually means encountering surprises - and some are actually pleasant. Yesterday my hubby helped by getting on a ladder and handing dishes and other items from a high shelf down to me. One was this lovely old pitcher that belonged to my grandmother. Inside the pitcher was a magazine clipping and my late mother’s notation in pencil that it was clipped from “House & Garden,” the June 1974 edition. I’ve certainly dusted this pitcher many times since 1974, but I don’t remember seeing this clipping. Although my grandmother’s pitcher isn’t exactly like the one described in the clipping, when I looked at the bottom of it, I saw that its hallmark is identical to the one in the clipping - which, of course, is what prompted my mother to save this clipping inside the pitcher.
As I washed my collection of pitchers, I wondered why people don’t use pitchers much anymore. No doubt it’s because of the way things are packaged today. We pour a glass of milk right out of the gallon jug. Our grandmothers - or great-grandmothers - milked the cow and needed something to put the milk in. Today we pour juice from the container it comes in. When I was a child, juice always came in cans. It wasn’t safe to store the juice in its can in the refrigerator, so it was put in a pitcher for serving. Although the heyday of pitchers is past, I still use a pitcher for iced tea or lemonade. One or two pitchers would be sufficient, but I can’t part with my little collection of pitchers, so they will go back on the high shelf in my dining room now that they’ve had the dust washed off of them.
