For the last couple of years--ever since we moved into our
"new" house--I've been collecting a few eclectic pieces of
old china for the living room shelves. Not a complete set of anything, just pretty pieces I come across at garage sales or thrift stores. While I was at
my parents' house at Christmastime I was able to add a few pieces from my past. Here's the story:
When I was growing up my dad almost always had a secondary job in addition to pastoring. In 1976, when I was 10 years old, he worked at the A&P grocery store. We liked that job for him because he often brought home really cool stuff that the store was discontinuing. That year, in celebration of the Bicentennial, A&P carried this set of Liberty Blue dishes as a special promotion. You've seen those types of deals.
Buy so many dollars worth of groceries, get a certain piece of china for a really cheap price this week. At the end of the promotion, for some reason, the store had a whole bunch of the little dessert bowls leftover, plus, apparently, a cream pitcher and salt-and-pepper set, and I don't remember what else.
Mother had the idea that we girls could start our hope chests with these dishes. So we did! I think I had a dozen of the little bowls. No plates (the plate in the picture is actually a different pattern), no cups and saucers, just these few odd pieces.
I never did care for a busy pattern on dishes, so I didn't think these were especially pretty, but I did think it was interesting that each piece featured a different patriotic scene. The little dessert bowls have Betsy Ross. For some reason the cream pitcher and the salt-and-pepper shakers both have Paul Revere. I found a list of other dishes (and scenes) in the set at
Robbins Nest, and I was just amazed at the prices! Which brings me to the second part of the story.
Like I said, I wasn't real crazy about these dishes, but I did use the little bowls for several years when I was first married, just "for every day" and of course, some of them got broken. After we had been married 13 years, we were packing up to move from Kansas to Idaho. My mother came to help. We had a garage sale and got rid of a lot of stuff, the way you do when you move. I stuck these dishes in the garage sale box, but I guess my mother decided they were worth saving. I didn't remember that at all.
At Christmastime (just past) I noticed that she had two of the little bowls sitting on a shelf in the bathroom with shells in them. I assumed they were some
she had from the left-overs Dad brought home all those years ago. I thought how neat it would be to have them for my "dish shelf" so I decided to ask her about them. "Mother, you know how you've said that if we see something in your house that we want, we should just ask you for it? Well, I'd like to have those two little Liberty Blue bowls that you have in the bathroom."
Her immediate response was, "Why, of course! Take them!" So I moved the shells to another dish and washed the bowls. The next day she came in carrying a taped-up envelope box from the basement. "Karla, look here!" I went to see what she had. This was the box of "treasures" she had "rescued" from my garage sale almost 12 years ago. In the box was another bowl, the cream pitcher, and the salt-and-pepper shakers! (The rest of the stuff in the box I still didn't want.)
I was happy to have these nostalgic pieces back in my collection. And my mother is just gloating that she thought to save them... especially after I showed her the current price of these dishes!
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