Yellow Pyrex
I got the yellow. The brown and the avocado are at camp. The red one, which I always thought was orange, is still at my mother’s house, though she is gone. I have other bowls, even other Pyrex bowls, yet I always gravitate to the 1950s yellow one when I am making something special. It was my grandmother’s bowl, and after that, my mother’s. I don’t remember when it was passed to me; likely when I was first out on my own, and my mother determined that no kitchen was complete without a good mixing bowl. I never thought much of it, back then. It seemed both ugly and outdated, unsophisticated, and definitely not a color I would have chosen.
My grandmother and mother loved to bake, and so do I. When I use the bowl, I think of how I am placing my hands where theirs once laid, spatulas scraping the sides, fingers dipping in for a taste. I am particular about using the bowl to make my children’s birthday cakes, hoping that some ancestral magic will enter from the smooth glass surface into the fluffy, sweet, sponge, keeping it moist and light rather than dense and dry, bridging the now with the hereafter, a bit of them going directly to my children who were robbed of knowing them as they should have.
I wonder, what did they make in the bowl? A Jell-O mold? Fruit salad? Tuna fish? Meatloaf? How many of their cake batters had clung to the sleek edges of this mid-century wonder? Do any molecules from what they created linger in the bowl’s pores, somehow working their way into my confection, joining the three of us together again as we were in my grandmother’s womb- I as a mere egg in my unborn mother’s ovary, our blood merged as one? These are silly musings while I sift, stir, measure, and pour; my wedding ring clanking on the side of the bowl, as theirs did, too. I am certain they never would have foreseen that a simple, yellow, Pyrex would tie us together still, giving me comfort in their absence, keeping their memories fresh in my mind, and my profound longing for them in the yellow depths of my soul.