Hospital-i-tea Blogathon:Tea Pots Shawnee Embossed Rose

More for the Gracious Hospital-i-tea Blogathon this week!

This is the Shawnee Pottery Embossed Rose Design, manufactured sometime in the 1940s I believe.  As far as I know my mother never drank tea from this teapot. She always heated up water, poured it in a mug and added a bag.

She said that she and my aunts had bought this pot for one off HER aunts and then it was left to Mom when the aunt passed away.  Mom always had in in her cupboard, never displayed, never used.

In fact, so many of the things she had were squirreled away in a  dark cupboard. I think that is so sad.  Beautiful things should exist to bring pleasure to the owner.  I display everything, and use many things.  With so many children in the house some things are not used very often..but they are used!

After I took this picture I thought it was significant, although I had not planned it that way.  The tea pot is in the image three times, one as a reflectin in the buffet top, one as a reflection in the mirror and one as itself.  I thought that was apropos, that it has belonged to three generations, one that is dark and almost unknown to me, one that I can remember clearly but not touch, and then me.  Reality now.

I think one of the most important things to teach my children, for me, is that things are meaningless, it is what they represent and symbolize that hold the value.  If  this teapot was broken I would smile and ask the breaker to help me sweep it up. I still have the memories is represents and nothing can take that away.

Maybe I am way to introspective today.  I find that women, especially women that enjoy the rituals of life and know how to feed their spirits, have one tendency that bothers me. Often graciousness becomes haughtiness and a concern over our beautiful things and our impeccable manners.  Rather than touching people’s lives with the beauty in us we alienate them with what is often percieved as snobbishness.
My spiritual mom, the woman that discipled me as a young woman, is the most gracious, genteel, southern woman that I have ever met.  She enjoys beauty in all things from the real flowers that surround her to the  artwork that she has in her home.  She reflects that quiet and gentle spirit that I am still working on.  And honestly..I will be working on for a long, long time.

Yet, she would be as comfortable and gracious in a mud hut, drinking tea from a chipped mason jar with a toothless peasant that burped the alphabet as she would at a high tea with the Queen of England.  She teaches not by what she says but by being so imbued with sweetness that everyone just wants to be like her.  Being around her changes people.

I want to be just like her when I grow up.

Image:Marye Audet