The teacup lived inside my grandmother's china cabinet. It was red. Not fire engine red or tomato red or strawberry red, but deep red, like a sunset in October.
It was trimmed in gold and was as delicate, and almost as light, as a butterfly, and just as sweet and perfect.
It was my teacup, on Sundays, at least, when we would visit the home of my grandmother, and of her sisters.
The roast beef and the potatoes and the apple pie done, the coffee would be poured.
"And Barbara," one of them would ask, "you would like your coffee in your teacup?"
They didn't need to ask. I would nod, and they would fuss, three whitehaired women filling Royal Doulton teacups at the dining room table, reporting about the sermon at that morning's service.
I added cream and just a touch of sugar. I would have been eight, or 10, or 14. I might never have pondered sugar at home, but I did with a ruby red teacup.
But the roast beef dinners, like all things, could not last forever.
As happens in life - in all of our lives - the grandmother and her sisters moved where better care could be afforded, no longer able to care for their home, let alone make an apple pie.
Their belongings became dispersed, and my teacup disappeared.
It had landed, perhaps, inside the buffet of an aunt or a third cousin or on the kitchen shelf of one of many nephews or nieces. My mother and sisters didn't know.
But they knew how much I missed it.
There were, after all, few things of that home I had wanted quite as much. The linens meant nothing. There had been platters and serving spoons and wingback chairs for the taking when the sisters left their home, but I had no need or space - or desire - for any of it. I hadn't touched any of those things on a Sunday.
This summer I had a birthday.
My younger sister's present was wrapped in tissue, inside a flowered gift bag.
"It may not be exactly like the original," my sister had written on the card. "But I hope it is pretty close."
I pulled it out of the bag.
"Be very careful," my mother said.
It was a teacup, a red one trimmed with gold, a near replica of the one I'd last held decades ago. My sister, my mother told me, had bought it at an antique store. She'd been scouring such stores for years.
The next day, and the following day, and the day after that, I made my morning coffee, and poured it in the teacup.
I will never know its history, but that doesn't matter at all.
My teacup has a story, and my sister remembers it well.
