Two thousand dollars' worth of china In 1962, when my mother was engaged to be married, she bought a $2000 set of Minton bone china in the S-665 Downing pattern. →[More:]She was a teacher and I doubt she would have made much more than $2000 a year, and she might have made less. She told me she "had visions of being very elegant, and of entertaining".

She was marrying a farmer, and they had very little money. They ended up living with my grandparents for the first year of their marriage while my father built our house. I said to my mother once, "If you'd invested that $2000 in 1962, and left it...", and she said, "But I wouldn't have left it. I would have taken it out to use to build our house when we needed money so badly for that."

The china mostly just sat in the cupboard. We did use it a few times a year, for Thanksgiving and Christmas and other special occasions. I've always meant to write a short story entitled "Two Thousand Dollars' Worth of China" or something like that, about a young woman who buys an expensive set of china because she has certain expectations of her marriage, and then finds the china doesn't suit the reality. I did use the china set in a similar way in a novel I'm writing.

I don't think you'd find too many young women today who'd use such an enormous amount of money in such a way, who'd outfit themselves for marriage with dinnerware and expect to be an elegant homemaker as though that was just what people did. It was very much symptomatic of the times my mother was in.

Mind you, my mother is a very practical, very independent woman who never sat back and expected to be supported by my father. She had supported herself from the time she was 16, she put herself through teacher's college, and she paid for the wedding with no help from her family and not much help from my dad. She continued teaching after marriage until she had two children and it wasn't financially viable to pay childcare for two out of her salary, and she went back to work when her youngest child was four. Even while she was at home with us she always earned some money in various ways: taking in foster children, sewing for other people, tutoring, selling produce from the garden. And she has always been the one who manages the household budget. Perhaps that why the china has always caught at my imagination, because it seemed like such an uncharacteristic decision. Not that my mother didn't always have her notions of How a Household Should Be Run, and fret a lot at the gap between her standards and what we simply had to settle for.

Anyway, she still has the set of china, with just one piece missing: the plate the gravy boat sits on. I suppose some day the china will be mine, because my sister doesn't want it. While I was at home over Christmas I decided I'd try to find a gravy boat plate on the net (the pattern was discontinued in 1975), and give it to her as part of her Mother's Day gift. I've set up an eBay alert for the purpose.