OUR WHITE DISHES

“We’d received most of the eight place settings as wedding gifts a decade earlier.”

When we divorced in 2001, my soon-to-be ex-husband requested our creamy white dishes, a French-leaning design with delicate scalloped edges. We’d received most of the eight place settings as wedding gifts a decade earlier. The rest we purchased later, when we began making some (not much) money after graduating law school.

Fifteen years, I’d loved him. Ten years, I’d loved the dishes. The coffee he gifted me each morning somehow tasted even better in those pretty white cups. The sturdy white plates and bowls held the many tasty dinners he cooked us. Our two children ate meals served on the dishes even before they were born. On April 4, 1992, he wrote our daughter in my pregnancy journal: This morning, I cooked you and your mom a real good breakfast so you could have a good day; besides, maybe you will like eggs when you grow up (are born). His fluffy eggs looked like winter sun on those white plates.

I’d hoped our marriage would be as durable as the plates. But we’d started dating young (I was barely 15) and married during our final year of college. As we each came more fully into our adult selves, we lost the thread of our common story.

When he asked for the dishes, my first impulse was to refuse. But I didn’t want to succumb to what a law school friend had dubbed the KitchenAid effect, wherein the spouse with lesser culinary skills demands the KitchenAid mixer only because the other spouse wants it. And here’s the thing: Divorce is a wise teacher. It asks you to hold multiple, divergent truths. I loved those dishes, and I was eager to lighten my load. I remember feeling oddly grateful for my husband’s willingness to haul off the bulk of our marital accumulations. I was ready to be free.

Nearly two decades passed; I didn’t miss him or the dishes. We parented cooperatively from our separate households, even after a mental health crisis and job loss caused him to move back north, to the place that still held memories of when we were last good together. But late in 2019, I began dreaming about the white dishes. My waking body itched with their memory, and I started searching eBay and thrift shops for similar sets. I was still searching early in 2020 when my ex suddenly and unexpectedly died. Thoughts of dishes evaporated as I supported our grieving kids. My own grief, a decidedly complex one after two decades apart, could wait.

Ten months after his dad’s death, I asked my son if he remembered the white dishes. “I have those dishes,” he said. “Dad gave them to me a few months before he died.” Around the time my dreams of them began.

Not wanting the dishes, my son dropped them off on a warm November day. Aside from a few missing bowls, the place settings were intact. Though a bit grimy. As if they hadn’t been used in years. I filled my sink with hot soapy water and washed them—slowly, reverently—as tears tickled the sides of my nose. Through multiple moves and a remarriage, my ex had kept the pretty white dishes, holding on to this small but significant artifact of our life together. Now I will be the keeper. I will be the one not letting go. 

—Heidi Fettig Parton

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Heidi Fettig Parton’s writing can be found in Brevity, Forge Literary, Fugue Journal, Multiplicity Magazine, North Dakota Quarterly, Sweet Lit, The Manifest-Station and elsewhere; her Brevity essay, “The Once Wife,” was nominated for Best American Essays 2023. A resident of Stillwater, Minnesota, she’s working on her first novel.