The Bowl
A vessel, a story, a writing exercise, a holy moment.
A bowl can seem like such an innocuous thing. Just an everyday object. Something you reach for without thinking. A container for soup or cereal or mixing cornbread.
But I’ve been thinking about a particular bowl in our kitchen—a humble, scratched-up thing—and how it quietly holds a whole lineage. An entire life of memories.
I’m going to give an assignment to some of my writing students: Write about a bowl. Any bowl. Make it as compelling as you can. Follow the story wherever it leads.
So, I sat down to do the assignment myself. And here’s where the bowl took me.
The bowl I’m thinking of is metal, but lightweight. It has no stamp or logo, no brand name on the bottom. It just exists, unpretentious and well-worn, with the kind of presence that comes from decades of use. My mom used it constantly when we were kids.
She mixed things in it: brownies, cakes—and frosting to put on both. Sometimes she’d hold the bowl cradled in one arm and stir with the other, beating a batter into a perfect sheen. The gloss shone from that unassuming bowl. And after she scooped or poured out the contents, we’d lick the bowl clean with our fingers until every last trace was gone.
Truth be told, the bowl had a different, but simultaneous, purpose. When one of us was down with the stomach flu, that’s the bowl my mom would set next to our bed in case we couldn’t make it to the bathroom in time. I don’t know why she chose it for such a messy and menial task. Maybe because it was lightweight and easy to clean.
It’s been washed (and, yes, disinfected) a thousand times. And still, it holds something that feels sacred. The patina of time. The energy of all those meals and memories. The dents from being knocked against the counter, or dropped, or just lived with.
It wobbles slightly before settling on the counter, like it has to find its footing. It makes a high, hollow, almost singing sound when you strike it with a spoon. A “ping.” A kind of kitchen bell. It’s amazing to think that I’ve heard that sound for more than 65 years. A small reminder. I’m still here.
One Christmas Eve—maybe two years before she passed—my mom came to spend the night with us. She was in her late eighties, but still gardening in the warm months and quilting in the cold ones. We planned to spend the evening making Sweet Petals together.
The recipe came from the back of a flour sack from the 1950s, and my mom had made it every Christmas of my childhood. It was kind of like monkey bread or cinnamon rolls, but better: narrow strips of dough rolled in sugar and cinnamon and ground-up walnuts, arranged in a round cake pan, petal by petal, until it looked like a flower in bloom.
After my mom got settled in that Christmas Eve, we started to gather a few ingredients for our baking. But then she started to feel unwell. Angina. She’d had it since I was a teenager.
I remember being around twelve years old, standing at the foot of her bed while she tried to breathe through the pain. I remember my sister Kathy skipping a school dance to stay home and help. I felt bad that Kathy was missing the dance. I felt bad that my mom was in pain. I felt bad that my dad had had a major heart attack a year or two before and had been in the hospital for what felt like weeks.
As I stood watching my mom, I didn’t know whether to go hide in the bathroom or pretend I was reading or turn the TV on loud or try to make my mom laugh, and so I didn’t really do anything except wonder if either one of my parents was going to live much longer.
They did. My dad lived to be 84. And on this Christmas Eve, when my mom and I were going to make Sweet Petals, she was 88. Still, the heart issues had never gone away. And on this night, she’d forgotten to pack her nitroglycerin for her angina.
She lay on the couch in our family room and moaned in pain.
“Do you think you might have a pill tucked away somewhere?” I asked. She shook her head “no.”
Just in case, I went through her purse, through her travel case, through her pockets. As I heard her toss and turn on the sofa, trying to find a more comfortable position, I thought maybe I could hide in the bathroom. Pretend I was reading. Turn the TV on loud. Try to make her laugh. But there was no denying the pain then, just as there’d been no denying the pain when I was twelve.
Every search for a nitro pill came up empty.
Her house—the house where I grew up—was more than thirty minutes away. So I called the Walgreens twenty minutes from our place and headed out to pick up an emergency prescription. When I got back, she was still on the sofa, her face tense with pain.
Gingerly, she took a pill from my outstretched hand and put it under her tongue. “Thank you,” she said, polite as ever.
She took a deep breath. And gradually, but more quickly than you’d think possible, the tension in her face melted away. After a few minutes, she sat up. In a few more minutes, she stood, pain free. And in about thirty minutes, she was back in the kitchen.
And we were making Sweet Petals.
In that same bowl.
The bowl has outlasted a lot. Parents. Christmases. Moves. Years of growing up and growing older. You can see the striations inside—spoon marks and whisk trails from thousands of stirs and swirls. And the blemishes outside—fine lines and age spots, just like anyone who has lived a long and useful life. You can feel the weight of it in your hands, not because it’s heavy, but because it has presence.
That’s the thing about certain objects: they become talismans. They hold stories you didn’t realize were still inside you.
And when you reach for them—on an ordinary Tuesday, or a holiday, or a day you didn’t expect to be remembering—they meet you where you are. They carry the past without fanfare. They give it back to you, gently, in the form of a sound, a smell, a motion. A bowl on a counter. A batch of brownies. A mother, recovered and stirring.
A humble bowl can be holy. In fact, it seems, the most ordinary things are.
With blessings,
Deb
If you’d like to try this writing exercise, here’s your invitation:
Write about a bowl. Any bowl. Yours, your grandmother’s, a chipped one from the thrift store. Write what it looks like. What it holds. Where it came from. Let the story reveal itself. Let it surprise you.
And if something beautiful comes out of it, I hope you’ll share.
Speaking of writing and women, here’s another invitation:
In August, we’re holding our third Her Spirit writing retreat for women. This is a Story Summit event, and it’s always magical—especially since we’re gathering in spectacular Santa Cruz, California.
We have a stellar faculty, a focus on fiction and memoir, and a sense of sisterhood that makes this much more than a writing retreat.
If you’ve been looking for a way to study with some of the most inspiring and successful women in publishing, take time out of your busy life, and believe in yourself and your story, please check out all the details. We’d love to have you join us for this all-inclusive event in a place of beauty and serenity—a place you belong.
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A NOTE TO MY READERS: I write “A World of Your Own” as a member of the Iowa Writers’ Collaborative, which is led by Julie Gammack, of Des Moines. I’m honored to be part of this group, featuring the diverse voices of more than 70 professional writers and journalists across the state of Iowa. I encourage you to check out their columns.
Thank you for this, Debra. I love this reminder that items can be talismans, reminding of the sweetest of stories within.
Having a tough day and reading your words took me to a better place. Thank you Deb.