Small Magic

The box sat on the dining room table, full of assorted kitchenware. Tiny spoons and forks of unknown uses, a cream colored saucepan with a red tin lid, yellowed Tupperware containers of every size, and a layer of cooking utensils scattered throughout. On the very top laid an aluminum ladle with a simple pattern around the edge of the handle and a note attached to it:

Granny sorted through her things and specifically wanted this to belong to you.

Love, Grandma 8-)

Granny was 98 when she died, and while she was still mostly mentally there, sometimes her reasoning for doing things was a mystery. When you reach a certain age, people tend to humor your whims without questioning the logic or lack thereof too closely. I unpacked the box, organized its contents throughout my kitchen smiling as I pulled out the well-loved objects. I didn’t necessarily need any of these items, but Granny grew up during the Great Depression and I couldn’t bring myself to get rid of things that she had painstakingly cared for. The ladle found a new home in my utensil jar and the note sat on the counter.

The first time I used the ladle, I hadn’t thought about the note for some time, I was simply reaching for something to serve the creamy potato soup I had made for supper. With a bowl in one hand and the ladle in the other, I unsuspectingly dipped it into the soup.

I looked at the soup in the bowl and frowned. No longer was it the milky white of potato soup, but the rich brown of a beef stew. My eye traveled up the arm holding the utensil, had that freckle always been there? I wondered. There was a small rustle at the hem of my shirt and I looked down expecting to see my dog’s wet nose lifted to take in the smells coming from the pot, hoping for me to drop something, but instead it was a small child. Mentally, I was startled enough to drop the bowl, back into the stove, and knock over the pot of soup, but my body did none of those things. I felt myself turn to the child at my side, smile, and to my deepening shock, speak. The voice that came from my mouth unbidden spoke slowly and kindly to the child and asked what she wanted before carefully handing her the bowl and sending her to the table. I watched her toddle off and noticed there were two more children and a man sitting at the table. A table I didn’t recognize, in a kitchen I was sure I had never been in before.

I must have been dreaming or hallucinating or maybe having some kind of mental break. I didn’t seem to really be here, at least not the me that I believed myself to be. I was here but someone else was running the show, I was simply looking through a window, watching it happen.

My hands dipped the ladle into the transformed soup and filled more bowls until I had enough for each of the people seated at the table behind me and myself. I stirred the soup one more time and placed the ladle down in the spoon holder.

As soon as my fingers left the ladle, I was back in my own kitchen, with my own hands that I was in control of. I would have been less surprised if I had appeared in bed as if I had just waked from an odd dream. I wish now that I could say I kept my head and maybe tried to recreate whatever had just happened to me, but that was not the case. I chalked it up to some strange medical phenomena - perhaps an absent seizure? - with a mental note to call my doctor, and moved along with life. It wasn’t until it happened again that I began to put together what was happening. The next time, I had a big pot of spaghetti sauce, made from my backyard garden tomatoes, onions, and basil, and I was about to dip some out to put it in a freezer bag to use throughout the year.

As soon as the ladle touched the sauce, I was back in that other kitchen and the body that wasn’t mine. I still held a ladle-full of rich red spaghetti sauce, but instead of putting it into freezer bags there was a veritable army of bell jars lined up ready to be filled, lidded, and put into a water bath. The jar nearest to me had a funnel sitting in the top, waiting. Slowly and carefully, I put the ladle to the sauce and transferred it to the first jar repeating until it was filled to the shoulder. I looked on as this process went on, all the way up until each jar was full and I placed the ladle in the sink.

Back in my own house, I began to formulate a theory. While I still thought I may be losing my mind or experiencing a medical anomaly, I had read enough fantasy books to let my imagination run a bit wild. I thought back on the experiences and everything I noticed. The three children (two girls and a boy), the man, the potato soup turned beef stew, the freezer bags turned canning enterprise, the same ladle that real me had. I thought about the voice that spoke to the child and how it seemed familiar along with the faces of the children and the man. Without knowing exactly what I was looking for, I grabbed a box of photos from their top shelf home in the spare closet and began to pull them out one by one.

The box contained a wide range of photos. Ones from my childhood and high school years, my parents when they were first married and a few from their childhoods, and a very small bunch in a yellowing envelope. When I opened the envelope I found a collection of photos of my grandma as a little child playing with her siblings in fuzzy sepia tones and a photo of her, her brother and sister, her dad, and her mother. Granny.

As I examined each face in the photograph, the pieces began to fall into place. The faces were familiar because I loved them all, just when they were old and gray. The voice that had come from my mouth when I spoke to what had to have been my grandma as a young child wasn’t mine at all but the slow, unhurried speech that I knew belonged to Granny.

I don’t know if Granny knew what a gift she had given me when she packed the ladle into that box. Perhaps it was a bit of small, every day magic or perhaps she stays close by to share little bits of her life with me whenever she can. I’ve gotten many little glimpses of her life now. Sometimes they are ones I’ve seen before like re-watching a favorite movie scene and sometimes its one that I don’t know. Serving gravy over mashed potatoes at family holidays. Handing the ladle over to one of her children sitting on the floor surrounded by pots and pans. Dishing up hearty stew in the plentiful years and thin soup when money was tight. It doesn’t happen every time I use her ladle, but often enough that now it feels familiar and comforting. A reminder that I come from a legacy of love.

We may not understand the reason that elderly people make choices, say strange things, or delegate objects to others. Perhaps, the older we get the more little magic we can see. Perhaps there’s a reason why witches are always depicted as old ladies, not because being old makes someone a witch, but that age give us the ability to see the patterns and connections in the world and to pass them on.